A year later, the anti-expert instinct Trump had fostered began to show in a different context. States with more Joe Biden voters began seeing much higher rates of vaccination than states that had preferred Trump. The former president’s advocacy was halting and constrained, recognizing that there was more political value in standing against the “so-called experts” than in trying to persuade people to protect themselves against the virus. So his most fervent supporters went looking for more miracles. Florida embraced those antibody treatments. Others began to hype the drug ivermectin.
There was never any evidence that ivermectin was particularly effective at treating coronavirus infections. A smattering of studies suggested that there might be some benefit, but they were limited in scale. By March 2021, the Food and Drug Administration was warning that it hadn’t found any demonstrable benefit from taking the drug to treat covid. But then the delta variant of the coronavirus began to spread, causing particular devastation in states that were less vaccinated and, relatedly, had shown more support for Trump. So many people in those areas sought out ivermectin, convinced that some cure existed beyond the highly effective vaccine promoted by the Biden administration and the “experts.”
It’s important to emphasize how ivermectin correlated to politics. Research published last month showed that counties that supported Trump strongly in 2020 were those that saw more ivermectin prescriptions written in the final months of that year, as attention began to turn to the drug. Google searches for ivermectin in August and September of last year were far higher in a number of metropolitan areas that had backed Trump by wider margins in 2020.
Some of this is a function of ivermectin’s approved use in agriculture: rural areas would be expected both to show more support for Trump and to have more animals needing a drug like ivermectin that targeted parasites. But this was also the period in which ivermectin searches surged, so it’s clearly also linked to the pandemic.
We will never know how many Americans who might have lived had they been vaccinated decided against it, trusting that drugs such as ivermectin would keep them alive. We do know, though, that there was a concerted effort to convince people that ivermectin would do so, an effort that intertwined with partisan rejection of government expertise. We can say with confidence that the atmosphere of disinformation about ivermectin led to people dying who would otherwise have lived.
We know how deadly covid has been. We’ll never know just how deadly this rhetoric was.
