The New Hampshire House of Representatives has voted to make ivermectin available at any pharmacy that wants to distribute this drug even without a prescription. It will likely pass the Senate and become law.
It’s a hugely positive breakthrough for medical and pharmaceutical freedom. It’s only tragic that this wasn’t the situation two years ago. The doctors the world over who have rallied behind this treatment believe many lives might have been saved. If one state in the Northeast had at least made the option available, outcomes might have been very different.
Magnificent! What’s key here is the concept of human choice.
The irony is bitter: The vaccine mandates have been universal and people have lost careers for refusing them or been rejected for participation in public life. People were forced to get shots of doubtful efficacy in most cases that many people didn’t want because they didn’t see the need and feared their side effects.
Meanwhile, a drug they would have chosen to take was denied to them, again by force, and physicians who believed they were saving lives had their licenses taken away for using their professional discretion.
A very strange political war broke out in the United States over the drug, however, such that people’s acceptance or rejection of it somehow signaled political loyalties—an absurdist example of how politicized the entire pandemic had become. In the end, it works well or does not: biology doesn’t care about party affiliation.
Why did this happen? There are theories. It’s generic. It’s cheap. It’s widely available. Therefore the financial interest didn’t favor it. Another theory is that early talk of ways to rationally and humanely deal with COVID missed the main and completely implausible message of lockdowns and then mandates: The goal of everyone should be to restructure life to avoid the bug no matter what.
In most parts of Central and Latin America, plus India and Eastern Europe, the drug was freely available to anyone. And the results are suggestively positive—though it would take a specialist to fully sort through all the noise in the data. The experience of on-the-ground COVID doctors, once fully free to prescribe what they believed was best, was positive from many reports.
In the United States, however, the situation was very different. Getting a prescription was hard enough. In some states, getting it filled was nearly impossible. You would get a blank stare and a headshake from the pharmacist. As a result, the generic became in high demand in gray markets, with people returning from Mexico with stashes and also ordering from abroad.
The doctors who have rallied around this drug as part of a full suite of therapeutics estimate that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. As a complete nonspecialist in this area, I have no idea if this is correct. But we do know that the physicians who held out, stuck to their guns against all smears, and figured out a way to serve their patients, even against regulatory attacks, became models of courage.
Sometimes it seems like the people who produce such propaganda are forever attempting to live in the world of the movie “Contagion,” where every alternative treatment is a scam promoted by a corrupt “blogger” and where the CDC knows all. This cartoon is a smear in every way.
Such is the state of science at the highest levels. The deliberate cultivation of confusion is national policy. And these are the people we’re supposed to trust?
This battle is much larger than the legal status of ivermectin. That’s just one symbol. What’s really at stake here is the idea of medical freedom itself. And freedom is a precondition for scientific inquiry and the search for the truth. It’s also essential for public health. This is one of many lessons of the disastrously botched pandemic.
The decisions of the New Hampshire legislature to enshrine that freedom into law in this one instance represent a mighty tribute to the principle and a repudiation of the use of force in disease management.