there is some evidence that ivermectin has antiviral activity in-vitro, tested on primate cells. Many drugs have effects that are outside of on-label indications, as those are really just for marketing purposes.

Physicians are absolutely free to prescribe things off-label, do so routinely, and in fact in many situations the majority of prescriptions happen to be off-label.

The only concern here is 1) that concentration needed to achieve that effect may potentially be toxic to humans. 2) in-vitro studies mighte be insufficient/weak evidence and may fail in-vivo (happens all the time)

But the argument was that "the vaccines are too unproven so we should not trust them" and the solution is to take a medication that has seen orders of magnitude less testing and is known to be toxic (there are reports of large increases to calls to poison control because of this)?!

Ivermectin has been on the market for decades, it's side effects are well understood. It's used all the time around the world.

Toxic controls was very unfortunate events of people consuming veterinarian formulations designed for animals that weigh 1000+ lbs and overdosing. That means only that there is enough desperate people, and very few physicians willing to supervise the treatment.

I would be far more concerned about it's efficacy and people getting treatment that they think will help, when in fact it does not.

You broke the site guidelines egregiously with that last paragraph. Seriously not cool.

We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do anything like that on HN again—regardless of how wrong other people are, or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've been using HN primarily for flamewar. We ban that sort of account as well, so would you please not do that anymore? We're trying for curious, thoughtful conversation here.

Your house, your rules, my apologies.

Ivermectin has been tested and approved for use in humans. It is used to treat parasites and rosacea.

https://www.pdr.net/drug-summary/Stromectol-ivermectin-391.1...

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Ivermectin#section...

Don't be a sheep and take the highly safe and effective vaccine, take livestock drugs instead.