One of the more bizarre twists in the saga of the COVID pandemic has been doctors growing increasingly frustrated and even angry with patients asking for medical treatment rather than wholesale vaccination. We have been told for almost two years that COVID is a deadly disease. Naturally, when people test positive for COVID, they want to be treated to avoid serious illness. Instead, they are sent home to quarantine, with no medical treatment until they become seriously ill.

Some patients take exception to this approach and ask for ivermectin, which is being used outside of the United States to treat early COVID. There is a significantly lower incidence of serious cases of COVID in countries that use ivermectin for early exposures.

Doctors are not taking kindly to the suggestion that patients should have access to medication that can prevent serious illness. They are denouncing ivermectin as a veterinary drug as if they were not aware that it was developed for human use, that the FDA approved it for human use back in the 1990s, and that almost 4 billion doses have been administered around the world in the past 30 years. It’s true ivermectin was developed to treat parasites, not viruses, and that it is used for livestock as well as humans. However, there are a number of life-saving medications that are not being used for their original purpose.

It’s common knowledge that penicillin was discovered by accident when it was noticed that moldy bread destroyed bacteria. Less commonly known is that the heart medicine nitroglycerin was developed from the compound used in dynamite. Warfarin, a common blood thinner, started out as rat poison. Arsenic, another deadly poison, is used to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia. Even if ivermectin was originally developed for animals, there is no reason to discard it on that basis when it is being used successfully around the world to prevent dangerous illness and death from COVID.

Doctors are having none of it. Instead, they lash out at the very idea that patients should expect to be treated for COVID. They complain of being imposed upon by people who refuse to be vaccinated, overlooking the fact that even the vaccinated have become seriously ill or died of COVID or one of the many variants that have emerged since mass vaccination began. Doctors are not supposed to hurt us—yet I can’t think of anything more hurtful than telling people who test positive for COVID to go home and wait to see how sick they will get, then getting angry at those same people when they ask for a treatment that might prevent them getting sick at all.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the old south.

Image: Unfriendly looking doctors by Gordon Johnson. Pixabay license.

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