ivermectin is approved for human use and does get prescribed for parasitic infections. ivermectin in a dish killed covid. it basically ended there, but there were multiple older common drugs that turned out to actually have a positive effect on covid recovery and prevention. at some point it wasn’t actually scientifically obvious whether ivermectin would have a positive effect, and we also need to take that into account. just snarking “these idiots are taking horse dewormer” doesn’t help anyone, especially not when it was an open question and there were personal anecdotes about recovery and a whole bunch of uncertainty and policy mismanagement. people were regularly confronted with death, and that requires a lot of empathy to think about.