Just type two letters on Amazon’s internal search engine, an “i” and a “v” are enough, and immediately it is proposed to see what is on sale under the heading “ivermectin”. Which is a horse drug (in the truest sense of the word), a pesticide that many people are using as an alternative cure to the Covid vaccine, as a form of therapy to fight coronavirus. Only not only does it not work, it is also dangerous.
The discovery was made by The Verge and also verified and confirmed by Italan Tech: by typing “iv”, whether you are logged in to your Amazon.co.uk profile or not, the outcome is always the same and the proposed results are always the same (top image).
The numbers of the phenomenon
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The problem is grave per Amazon (a company spokesperson explained that “the autocompletion system is linked to customer activity” and that “we are blocking some automatic responses to solve this defect”), but it is also serious for people: According to the American FDA, this veterinary drug may have among the side effects “rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, swelling of the face or limbs, dizziness, seizures, confusion, drop in blood pressure and hepatitis“. It is so serious that about ten days ago, the FDA always invited us to stop these abuses, because “you are not horses, you are not cows”.
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More: in the United States, the Mississippi health authorities have made it known (pdf) that “at least 70% of recent calls to the emergency number for intoxications have been related to ingestion of ivermectin ”.
The issue has also touched other online platforms: Facebook, Google, TikTok and Reddit they are deleting hundreds of pages, videos, comments and posts reporting fake news on ivermectin, while so far Amazon has seemed a bit absent and distracted from this point of view.
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Why ivermectin is a problem
Also in the US, the CDC reported that cases of ivermectin poisoning have quintupled compared to before the pandemic and that there has been an increase in the use of this drug by 28 times in August compared to the prepandemic levels. At the same time, reports of poisoning or hospitalizations for the side effects of the drug have grown: “Ivermectin is currently not authorized or approved by the FDA for the treatment of Covid 19 – they said from the CDC – In addition, the National Institute of Health determined that at the time there are insufficient data for the treatment of coronavirus, and clinical trials are underway to get more information on future use ”. Although this drug can be used on humans in some, rare cases, such as against onchocerciasis or the so-called “river blindness”, there is no evidence of efficacy against the coronavirus, although it is often cited by No Vax and conspiracists as possible home therapy.
This is just the latest example of alternative medicines to combat contagion, such as colchicina, an anti-inflammatory for which there is no evidence of efficacy for outpatients, and the chloroquine, already rejected by clinical trials around the world.
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