Ivermectin is a human antiparasitic too. But more importantly, I’m pretty most of this is just a myth. The stories I’ve seen about mass ivermectin hospitalizations turned out to be hoaxes, see e.g. here. If you literally took an entire horse-sized dose (200μg/kg for a 700kg horse, so 140mg) as a 60kg human, you’d get a dose of 2.3mg/kg, 11x the recommended amount for infestation - which has been tested in humans to be safe. Ivermectin is amazingly safe for a drug; you have to really try to get an overdose.
So I think a few people (seems to be ~several hundred for all of US in 2021) did somehow manage to actually get themselves poisoned (I’d love to know how; I think I saw a statistic once about what dosages were found in ivermectin poisoning cases but I can’t find it in my bookmarks, and the few actual case reports I can find don’t provide a dosage), but most of the “horse dewormer” stories in the media were just political propaganda.
(The above isn’t getting into the question of whether ivermectin is effective against COVID, though. I think it was reasonable to think so back during the start of the pandemic, since the studies were really quite suggestive, and it was a safe drug to try, and the studies weren’t even debunked at the end - rather, it was found that the improvements were most likely due to the drug treating the coincidental parasite infestations the patients had. It’s not so reasonable now that we have better studies and real working anti-COVID drugs, and the people who suggest taking ivermectin for COVID nowadays sure are crazies, but I personally would not shame people for doing it back in 2021 or so. Taking one of the only drugs that seemed to be effective against a terrifying pandemic is just a smart thing to do, if it’s this safe.)
Ivermectin is a human antiparasitic too. But more importantly, I’m pretty most of this is just a myth. The stories I’ve seen about mass ivermectin hospitalizations turned out to be hoaxes, see e.g. here. If you literally took an entire horse-sized dose (200μg/kg for a 700kg horse, so 140mg) as a 60kg human, you’d get a dose of 2.3mg/kg, 11x the recommended amount for infestation - which has been tested in humans to be safe. Ivermectin is amazingly safe for a drug; you have to really try to get an overdose.
So I think a few people (seems to be ~several hundred for all of US in 2021) did somehow manage to actually get themselves poisoned (I’d love to know how; I think I saw a statistic once about what dosages were found in ivermectin poisoning cases but I can’t find it in my bookmarks, and the few actual case reports I can find don’t provide a dosage), but most of the “horse dewormer” stories in the media were just political propaganda.
(The above isn’t getting into the question of whether ivermectin is effective against COVID, though. I think it was reasonable to think so back during the start of the pandemic, since the studies were really quite suggestive, and it was a safe drug to try, and the studies weren’t even debunked at the end - rather, it was found that the improvements were most likely due to the drug treating the coincidental parasite infestations the patients had. It’s not so reasonable now that we have better studies and real working anti-COVID drugs, and the people who suggest taking ivermectin for COVID nowadays sure are crazies, but I personally would not shame people for doing it back in 2021 or so. Taking one of the only drugs that seemed to be effective against a terrifying pandemic is just a smart thing to do, if it’s this safe.)