Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a cheap, widely-available drug is apparently a “global solution to the pandemic”. So went the stories in the Daily Mail, the Mirror, the Financial Times, and elsewhere last week, all focusing on the drug ivermectin. It’s been described as “a fundamentally potent cure” for Covid-19 by one of its main proponents, and the media articles reported that it might reduce coronavirus deaths by an incredible 75 per cent.
The story was picked up by media personalities who, shall we say, don’t follow the mainstream consensus view on Covid, such as Julia Hartley-Brewer and Maajid Nawaz (the latter of whom claimed that ivermectin “should render lockdowns redundant”). Indeed, claims about ivermectin almost always receive huge attention on social media, sometimes garnering many thousands of likes and shares. Dozens of times in the past couple of months, I’ve seen, or been sent, the link to a website that purports to show all the current studies on ivermectin along with a meta-analysis – a type of study where all the data are put together to see the overall effect.
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