NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Four years ago, Tennessee became the first state to allow adults to buy the antiparasitic drug ivermectin from a pharmacy without first seeing a doctor. Pharmacies can use a pre-written, blanket prescription to sell to just about anyone who walks through their doors.
The drug is now marketed and sold across the state in roadside shops and small-town strip malls with little oversight from health authorities. Highway billboards advertise ivermectin as “Available Without a Prescription in Tennessee!” while dozens of pharmacies offer highly concentrated pills, sometimes at 10 or 20 times the potency of a standard tablet.
Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning, generally safe drug approved by the FDA for treating parasitic diseases in humans, which can generally be done with a single dose of three or four prescription-strength tablets. It is also used as a dewormer for horses and other livestock.
Its popularity surged during the pandemic as fringe doctors and anti-vaccine activists promoted it as a treatment for covid. Clinical trials have shown that ivermectin is not effective against covid.
Nonetheless, it has since become a symbol of resistance against the medical establishment among conservatives and followers of the Make America Healthy Again movement, championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta who studies health misinformation, said ivermectin became an “ideological flag” during the covid pandemic, opening the door for influencers to push the drug for other ailments to a “captured audience” even without proof it works for those conditions.
“This is really about profit. This is about political identity. This is about creating distrust in the existing biomedical community. This is about money,” Caulfield said in an interview with ABC News, which partnered with KFF Health News to report on ivermectin.
After a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship earlier this year, unproven claims that ivermectin is effective against the virus have been spread by some popular social media accounts and right-wing figures, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The World Health Organization says it has seen no research that shows ivermectin is an effective hantavirus treatment.
Tennessee’s ivermectin bill was shepherded by a Republican supermajority in 2022. Its passage blindsided state medical officials and handed a victory to medical groups that spread covid misinformation.
Some pharmacy websites now offer the drug as a treatment for covid, “long haul vax symptoms,” diabetes, or cancer — despite no evidence of its effectiveness for those purposes — while the new law largely gives pharmacists immunity from lawsuits or professional sanctions related to ivermectin.
The law was also a harbinger of legislation to come: More than two dozen states have since considered look-alike bills that wo