But what has been surprising to the researchers I spoke to is the extent to which these drugs — and the hope people have put in them — have been politicized. Ivermectin, in particular, has become a bit of a populist, anti-establishment cause celebre. It first started getting attention as a COVID-19 drug in April 2020, after the publication of a study where it seemed to slow the growth of SARS-COV-2 in a test tube. From those humble beginnings, it has been championed by Tucker Carlson, promoted in invited testimony to Congress, and embraced by the governments of Brazil and India. The journalist Matt Taibbi wrote an article promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that ivermectin works but news of it is being censored, because Big Pharma and/or the government doesn’t want you to know about a cheap cure for COVID-19. Some of these boosters have ulterior motives for wanting to believe in the hope of ivermectin. As a guest on Carlson’s show told the audience, if ivermectin cures COVID-19, then nobody would need vaccines.

Layperson advocacy isn’t always a bad thing, said Dr. Jeremy Faust, a specialist in emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. At the height of the AIDS crisis patients pushed for more (and faster) testing of more drugs, more accountability from the government and the health care industry, and more say in their own treatment. Today, we, the public, know more about what’s out there, we know better how to ask for what we want and we know more about the very legitimate reasons to question the industries tasked with our well-being. But our knowledge of how to evaluate evidence hasn’t grown at the same rate. “It’s like owning a Ferrari, but you don’t know how to drive,” C. Michael Gibson, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, said.

COVID-19 took all those good and bad aspects of layperson advocacy and magnified them, Faust said. He and other scientists and doctors told me they hadn’t seen medicine be this virulently politicized before.