Why didn’t Fauci promote ivermectin?

RFK Jr. claims that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could prevent or treat COVID-19 better and more safely than vaccines. He says health leaders like Anthony Fauci blocked these drugs so vaccines could be approved and sold. He also claims that places with fewer vaccinations and more use of these drugs had fewer COVID deaths, though he admits this does not prove vaccines caused more deaths.

Vaccines help prevent people from getting sick. Medicines such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are meant to treat people after they become ill. The FDA can allow emergency use of a product when there are no good, approved, and available options. Even if these medicines had been approved for treating COVID-19, they would not have replaced vaccines because treatment and prevention serve different purposes.

This claim also assumes that ivermectin is a proven treatment for COVID-19. Studies have not found that either medicine works well for treating the disease.

RFK Jr.’s argument is an example of an ecological comparison. He compares COVID-19 death rates in different countries and suggests vaccines explain the differences. But countries differ in many other ways. These include the age and health of the population, access to testing and hospitals, how deaths are counted, which virus variants were spreading, and what treatments were available. Because of these differences, country death rates alone cannot show whether vaccines caused the results.

Two large studies found that COVID vaccines saved millions of lives around the world. They also found that many lower-income countries could have prevented even more deaths if vaccines had arrived sooner and reached people faster.