While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by curing them of other problems and thus reducing the potence of covid. Not so much in the developed countries since the parasite problem was small.<p>Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide.<p>At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion.<p>This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it.<p>The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch.<p>It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear.<p>Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.