Florida Politics ran a snarky story headlined, “New Florida bill would make antiparasitic drug misused as a COVID remedy available over the counter.”
On Tuesday, Republican State Representative Jeff Holcomb filed a bill (HB 29) to allow ivermectin to be legally purchased without a prescription. In other words, over the counter. It’s still early, and the bill is far from being approved. But I’ve learned from insiders that the lower the bill number, the better. (Long-shot bills unsupported by the party usually get numbers in triple digits.)
Nevertheless, the filed bill alarmed Florida Politics. Its article grimly tallied terrifiying examples of people who died and were suspected of also taking ivermectin, and claimed ivermectin overdose patients were practically hogging the emergency rooms during 2021 (“a hospitalization a day”). The article did everything but remind y’all you ain’t horses.
Stop eating horse paste!
The left-leaning paper saw an apocalypse of peril approaching. Look out! Misinformation! “Despite the potential health risks,” FlaPol warned readers, “several states including Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas have passed laws this year permitting over-the-counter sales of ivermectin.” Oh, no!
But on the other hand, Tylenol— by all means, eat them by the handfuls. Who cares what the FDA says?
💊💊💊
The second Ivermectin story was even better. The Florida Pheonix ran another story about Florida and the anti-parasitic, headlined, “Ivermectin, from the Capitol to state-funded cancer research — it’s a thing in Florida.”
CLIP: Casey DeSantis announces historic Florida cancer investment and repurpose project (2:40).
Let’s be honest. Thanks to chronic Trump Derangement, Ivermectin triggers liberals. Just hearing that word makes them fume and angrily clench their jaws until they crack their crowns. They fervently wish the Nobel-winning drug would just go away, or at least return to Africa or whatever uncredentialed hellhole it wriggled out of.
Covid was bad enough. But the idea of conservatives being allowed to treat their cancers with the inexpensive medicine makes liberals want to scream in futile rage.
So you can imagine how upset they were when, on Tuesday, Governor Ron DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis, and Surgeon General Joe Ladapo held a press conference at the University of South Florida for World Cancer Research Day, and announced $60 million in new cancer research grants.
Everything was going fine until Casey said she expected some part of the new funding to be used for cancer research on ivermectin. “We should look at it,” Mrs. DeSantis said. “We should look at the benefits of it. We shouldn’t just speculate and guess,” she added innocently, seemingly unaware of how badly progressives would take that news.
For purposes of full disclosure, I personally know two people so far who’ve been diagnosed with late-stage cancers, took ivermectin in combination with other treatments (but not high levels of chemo and radiation), and both made a full recovery and are now cancer-free. (You would almost certainly recognize one of these folks, were I at liberty to say who they are.)
The Phoenix —one of the few platforms to even report the story— was beyond skeptical. It sneered so hard that it popped several blood vessels in its right eyeball.
“Ivermectin is not approved by the FDA for cancer treatment,” it insisted curtly. Then —and I’ve never seen a straight news story do this for any other drug— the Phoenix then listed every single known possible side-effect. “You can overdose on ivermectin, causing nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension (low blood pressure), allergic reactions (itching and hives), dizziness, ataxia (problems with balance), seizures, coma, and even death.”
Of course, the weasel word in that sneaky side-effect sentence was “overdose.” The list of side effects for ivermectin at normal dosages is much shorter and less alarming. I’d bet there are bad side effects for any drug someone overdoses on.
💊 The battle lines are being drawn. Liberals like the Phoenix have shot far past admitting ivermectin-cancer studies exist. They could have stopped short at demanding a large-scale, peer-reviewed, “gold standard” double-blinded study. That would have been their best move. Large-scale studies on ivermectin and cancer were always unlikely, since pharma won’t fund them.
But instead, liberals have decided to simply refuse to concede even any possibility ivermectin might help. They choose to call it “a thing” (as the headline said), and refuse to believe it, casting ivermectin into the same hallucinatory category as the Swamp Ape or the Mexican Chupacabra.
You have to hand it to them. That level of disbelief takes work. Even a quick lawyer’s search turned up dozens of studies showing ivermectin’s promise for treating cancer.
I’ve cited others before, but here’s another new one, published this April in Medical Oncology:
“Ivermectin,” the researchers began, “has shown promising anticancer potential.” They continued, “Originally developed for veterinary and human use against parasitic infections, ivermectin demonstrated significant antitumor effects in our study against tumor cells.”
Over the last four years, other independent studies have found more remarkable results combining ivermectin with traditional chemotherapy or other repurposed drugs, like metformin (a diabetes drug) and tamoxifen (an estrogen antagonist).
You can show these studies to progressives, but what’s the point? They won’t listen. They’ll just sneer, gobble some Tylenol, and sarcastically ask, Doing your own research again? It’s kind of tragic.
💊 In any case, now Florida —not the federal health agencies— has pledged $60 million for cancer studies focusing not on novel, high-tech, bespoke mRNA treatments, but on repurposed drugs including (but not limited to) ivermectin. This is what “public health” should be; funding the studies that pharma won’t.
Let pharma pay for studies on their new wonder drugs.
“Generic medicines are often overlooked,” First Lady DeSantis said, “because they are off-patent and don’t necessarily promise big profits.” Florida’s 2025 budget allocated $218 million total for cancer, with $60 million carved out for nutrition and “the repurposing of generic drugs such as ivermectin for cancer treatment.”
As they say, talk is cheap. But Florida just did more than talk. It allocated $60 million for grants to study repurposed drugs in treating cancer. That is a tangible step toward Making America Healthy Again. So far as I can tell, this level of investment by any U.S. state in repurposed cancer drugs is a historic first.
Florida has gone full MAHA. It has MAHA Mania.
