Aspiring Aspirin

“Remember ivermectin? The animal-deworming medication was used so avidly as an off-label COVID treatment during the pandemic that some feed stores ended up going out of stock … If you haven’t heard about it since, then you’ve existed blissfully outside the gyre of misinformation and conspiracies that have come to define the MAGA world’s outlook on medicine. In the past few years, ivermectin’s popularity has only grown, and the drug has become a go-to treatment for almost any ailment whatsoever.” Benjamin Mazer in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How Ivermectin Became Right-Wing Aspirin. “Nicholas Hornstein, a medical oncologist in New York City, told me that he’s had the same experience: About one in 20 of his patients ask about the drug, he said. He remembers one woman who came into his office with a tumor that was visibly protruding from her abdomen, having swapped her chemotherapy for some ivermectin that she’d picked up at a veterinary-supply store. ‘It’s going to work any day now,’ he says she told him when he tried to intervene.”