MAGA world is so fixated on promoting ivermectin I have to wonder who stands to profit and who is paying whom to tout it. You probably recall that the horse-worming drug took MAGA by storm as a "suppressed" therapy for COVID. Studies proved it ineffective. In 2023, it was baselessly hyped for flu and RSV.

Now, it’s back for cancer. After actor Mel Gibson told the apparently credulous podcaster Joe Rogan that three friends beat Stage 4 cancer with ivermectin and some other drugs, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis decided that was good enough reason to spend $60 million of taxpayer money studying ivermectin.

Via The Washington Post:

“Mel Gibson was on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was talking about people that he was friends with and they overcame Stage 4 cancer,” DeSantis, a cancer survivor, said as she announced the move last month. “We should look at it, we should look at the benefits of it. We shouldn’t just speculate and guess.”

According to The Post, studies in laboratory settings “have shown ivermectin could have anticancer effects, but oncologists and medical experts caution there is not yet evidence that ivermectin is effective to treat cancer in humans.” The article noted that bleach also shows cancer-killing effects in a petri dish but it's too toxic to be used on humans.

I’m all for studying alternative treatments for cancer or other diseases. But not because a few of Mel Gibson’s friends claim to have beaten cancer with one of them. More importantly, the $60 million will come at the expense of other, more scientifically promising research into cancer treatments, The Post noted, especially since funding has shrunk in the wake of Trump cuts to federal research spending.

Here's the possible money quote from The Post: “DeSantis has not announced who will conduct the taxpayer-backed research, a decision that could help define whether the effort will produce trusted results.”

That decision will also tell us who stands to profit from that $60 million study.