State lawmakers are once again using their huge experience with scientific and medical research to influence the health decisions made by everyday Arkansans.
So far this legislative session, there have been bills to deregulate the sale of unpasteurized dairy products, remove fluoride from public drinking water, require public school students to watch a medically wrong video about pregnancy and to punish doctors for providing puberty blockers to transgender minors.
Add to that (not all-inclusive) list: Ivermectin.
For those of us who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those of us who lived through it in Arkansas, ivermectin may sound familiar. That’s because it was promoted by anti-vax communities, largely in conservative states, as a cure for the coronavirus. Adherents cited undiscovered studies (or social media stories, because those are always true) that proclaimed the medication a miraculous remedy for COVID.
Newsflash: It isn’t.
Ivermectin is a deworming drug that is used to prevent parasites in farm animals, like horses and cows. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also approved it to treat parasitic infections in humans. It’s been widely administered in developing countries for decades to treat “river blindness,” an infection caused by worm-infected blackflies that breed in rivers and streams, as well as elephantiasis, a disease spread by mosquitoes.
Now some of Arkansas’s legislators are proposing the human form of the drug be sold over the counter, no doctor’s prescription necessary.
Another newsflash: Only the FDA can approve the over-the-counter sale of medications in the U.S.
But the sponsors of Senate Bill 189 say they are trying to send those experts at the FDA a message: Y’all ain’t as sharp as you think.
“I believe we are a little bit ahead of the FDA,” Sen. Alan Clark (R-Londsdale), the bill’s lead sponsor, told the Arkansas Senate Thursday afternoon. (Clark also sponsored a successful bill to deregulate raw milk, ingestion of which can cause botulism and potentially kill you.)
Sen. Justin Boyd, a SB189 supporter, chimed in: “This bill makes an important statement on how slow and political our government can be to respond to the will of the people. While I do not believe our state can preempt the federal government on this issue, I do hope it leads to a challenge on that preemption. It makes an important statement to the rest of the country about how we feel about this issue and can challenge whether the federal government can determine whether a medication is over the counter or not.”
During the pandemic, ivermectin became so sought after in Arkansas as a cure for the virus that farm supply stores sold out of the products they kept in stock to utilize on thousand-pound animals. Some believers were ingesting the de-wormer prophylactically as part of their daily routines, because, you know, a dose of ivermectin a day keeps the coronavirus away.
But they were also overdosing on the farm-grade ivermectin sold for utilize on cows and horses. Poison control hotlines reported pretty substantial increases of calls from people who took so much of the dewormer, they’d probably be parasite free for multiple lifetimes.
Clark’s logic behind making ivermectin OTC is that people are still too stupid to not poison themselves.
“Right now, a lot of people are going to the agriculture stores and getting something much more concentrated,” Clark said. “And if they cannot do the math, or know how to do the math, it’s dangerous.”
But what is actually really risky is what else Clark and some of his legislative counterparts said on the Senate floor on Thursday. Actually not just risky, but grossly irresponsible.
The senator said he has a friend who is an oncologist who “has late-stage cancer who is taking it.”
“I cannot say he is taking it because he thinks it helps or that it doesn’t do any harm [to take it],” Clark said. “He is a very intelligent guy.”
Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch) added his erudite take: Ivermectin “showed tremendous results with inflammatory problems. They’re now finding it is working with certain cancers. They are doing a lot of experimentation and studies on ivermectin and finding out there are a lot of things. In fact, the guys who invented this drug won a Nobel Prize.”
We’re no medical geniuses here at the Arkansas Times, but we’re pretty sure if ivermectin did cure cancer, everyone would know about it. And two scientists did win a Nobel Prize for the drug, but specifically because it saved untold numbers of lives from deadly parasitic infections in places like sub-Saharan Africa.
It’s risky to make such proclamations as an elected official in general. It’s even more risky to make them to a public made up of constituents who already believe the de-worming medication has some secret medicinal powers that substantial pharma and the mainstream media are trying to hide for some unknown reason, as supporters also claimed Thursday.
Sen. Missy Irvin (R-Mountain Home), another proponent of SB189, characterized a physician who prescribed ivermectin to inmates at the Washington County Jail during the pandemic as a medical mastermind.
Dr. Robert Karas “was just doing what all other doctors were trying to do at that time in order to save patients’ lives,” Irwin said. “All they [doctors] had to rely on was their education and experience of treating different viruses using medications available to them and many [doctors] had to develop a cocktail of medication and study and understand the structure of the [coronavirus], which was available online, actually.”
What actually happened is that Dr. Karas was running a little Tuskegee-like experiment on the inmates, not informing them what medication they were receiving and putting their lives at risk should they become infected with the virus, not receive proper treatment and potentially die.
Karas settled with the former inmates in 2023 after they sued.
If you, too, would like to work on a cocktail of drugs to treat COVID-19, here is a link to its structure, online.
We suspect a bill to bring back leeches will come up next.
Stay tuned.
