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Doctors have known for more than a year now that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin isn’t effective against Covid. The FDA has explicitly warned against prescribing it to Covid patients, but many physicians still do—and public and private insurance companies are paying for it. A study published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that this drug has cost insurance companies more than a hundred million dollars. “People are really annoyed with insurance, that they don’t cover things that are evidence-based,” says lead author Kao-Ping Chua, an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. “And at the same time, now here’s an example of insurance covering something that’s not evidence-based.”

Last August, Chua noticed an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that noted a dramatic increase in ivermectin prescriptions during the pandemic. Before 2020, ivermectin prescription rates from US doctors were low—just a few thousand a week for parasitic diseases like scabies. Yet by the week […]

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