I'm skeptical of the "there's no money in it" angle. Ivermectin advocates seem to be suggesting that you take it as a preventative measure for covid - i.e., that the way to stop the pandemic is to have everyone take ivermectin. Each individual ivermectin tablet, at current levels of demand and quality control, costs a couple of dollars.

Compare that with the vaccine, which costs governments a couple tens of dollars, but people get at most four shots per year.

I agree that there isn't money in licensing the ivermectin patent, but there is absolutely a lot of money to be made in manufacturing ivermectin itself, convincing people to take preventative ivermectin, and meeting worldwide demand. And every single pharmaceutical company can play that game - not just a couple of very rich ones in rich countries with research labs capable of making their own covid vaccine. Frankly, it should be a little bit surprising that not even one of them has tried this strategy.