Mexico City’s giant Ivermectin experiment
The Mexico City government has been treating its citizens like guinea pigs to test out ivermectin. The deworming drug has been touted as a potential answer to the pandemic by a growing band of devotees, despite the small inconvenience that there’s no evidence to support its effectiveness against Covid.
Throughout 2021, those who tested positive in Mexico City received special home treatment kits from the municipal government. Alongside an oximeter and paracetamol, the boxes contained our old friend ivermectin.
Mexico City’s government was handing out Ivermectin like candy, our colleagues at Animal Politico report. Their decision to spend over $1.4 million on drugs that are not approved by the federal government caused a scandal. Their defense? They had “quasi-experimental” evidence that suggested people who received Ivermectin were 68% less likely to need hospital treatment.
The study that the government referred to in its policy was posted on the scientific platform SocArXiv in May 2021. Experts believe the government used it to retrospectively justify their actions. The study is “rife with conflicts of interest and ethical shortfalls”, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a sociology professor at the University of California-San Diego, told the Infodemic. The authors did not obtain informed consent to participate in the study from the participants and never declared their conflicts of interest.