> This lack of approval is the key feature of these treatments.

Lack of approval + length of use as medicine. There's a narrative that drug X has been used for 50 years (despite what it's used for) and therefore the pharma industry is uninterested in its success because they can't get rich off of it.

The latter is a common thread, along the lines of "what THEY don't want you to know."

But this makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of previously approved drugs, such as anticoagulants and dexamethasone, are part of the current standard of care; and their effectiveness has unambiguously been borne out by the data with multiple independent studies / analyses that all agree.

So why are THEY for these but against ivermectin?

Of course the whole idea of THEY is nutty. The idea that there is this level of coordination / cooperation among pharma companies is ridiculous enough to be the punchline of a joke.

You only make it ridiculous, it's actually really simple. Bureaucrats in agencies have their procedures and their agenda. Very little coordination is needed to ignore some controversial medication, associated with poor countries and antivaxers, when there are other things they can appear to be working on.

Many people sick with COVID are not getting this "standard of care" you suggest exists. Just tylenol and good luck. So those other drugs are not very far from ivermectin in terms of accessibility. All effective drugs are controlled and access is not given to the broad public, only to doctors and pharmacists, and many of these gatekeepers keep them from the sick people. You have to be lucky and have a good doctor who cares about you, not just about following what government agencies tell him to do. Then he may give both "unproblematic" stuff like heparines and also more "controversial" stuff like ivermectin.

Are these patients only being given Tylenol hospitalized? Because that would strain credulity.

The FDA regulates the marketing of drugs, not the practice of medicine. Physicians can prescribe whatever they want. Treatment guidelines are determined entirely by practicing physicians.

Uptodate is a good resource to check out if you want to see for yourself what clinical guidelines look like, and the type of evidence they are supported by.

https://www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-management-in-hos...

All that stuff about access to quality health care is totally true, but I don’t see how it’s relevant. Ivermectin is being described as a preventative drug comparable to the actual COVID vaccines, not merely a treatment once you’re already sick.