08-10-2021, 01:09 PM
How anti-vaxxers weaponized Ivermectin, a horse de-wormer drug, as a COVID-19 treatment
Quote:According to Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center, the right-wing obsession with Ivermectin may be important to that demographic merely because it sows distrust in science in general while stirring up vaccine skepticism.
"Politics got injected into it, and then Ivermectin became a crusade for certain individuals, as a way to kind of deflect the importance of the vaccine," Adalja told Salon. "It's the same kind of story of the politics of this pandemic that's driven a lot of the interest in Ivermectin — and when I do interviews on ivermectin I get a slew of hate mail."
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"There's no evidence that Ivermectin has a beneficial effect in treating COVID-19," Adalja said. "Studies that are there are of poor quality, none of which really has an unequivocally positive result. One of the studies which was touted to provide the most evidence has been shown to be invalid study."
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Imran Ahmed, CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, said that promoting the idea that treatments like Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 fall into one of three categories of misinformation promoted by anti-vaccine influencers. The three misinformation categories, Ahmed said, include "COVID isn't dangerous," "vaccines are dangerous," and the idea that you "can't trust doctors."
"This is all part of the spreading of the idea that vaccines might not be the safest way of dealing with this," Ahmed said.[It's part of] 'the government's trying to kill you with a vaccine,' and blah, blah. It's an extremist narrative."


