Editorial

Discussions and medical decisions about the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 should be based on facts, not scientifically untested and unproven rumors spread on social media. And certainly not on irresponsible health care advice prescribed by an elected official who seems to think a drug that kills worms in horses and cows might also destroy the Coronavirus in people.

A polite person might say "horse feathers" to such medical guidance from an unlicensed politician. A not-so-nice person might call the Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor a horse's rear end for mixing veterinary deworming with a human pandemic that has killed more than 430 people in Alaska, over 637,000 nationwide, and about 4.5 million worldwide.

Mayor Charlie Pierce has publicly backed ivermectin, an anti-parasitic deworming drug, as a potential lifesaver for COVID-19 patients. It's not like he whispered his horse story - he broadcast it at a borough assembly meeting and then saddled up a week later and again defended the drug on a talk radio program.

"Let the doctors experiment with perhaps some things that haven't been signed off by the Food and Drug Administration," Pierce said on Kenai Peninsula commercial radio station KSRM.

The FDA has approved ivermectin in people and animals for use against some parasitic worms and for head lice and skin conditions. No manufacturer has ever asked for FDA approval to market the drug to treat COVID, which is a virus, not a parasite.

Ivermectin is "a very inexpensive medication," Pierce said, as if the fact that it is cheap makes it OK. So is aspirin and Bengay, but neither cure COVID.

The mayor encouraged listeners to research the drug further, and he unwisely directed them to a website that recommends ivermectin and offers prescriptions from a doctor in Texas. If he had done his own research, he might have seen that the Texas Department of State Health Services issued a health advisory over the improper use of ivermectin - calls to the state's poison center for people exposed to the drug are triple last year's level.

Even before taking to the airwaves, the mayor at a borough assembly meeting in August got on his high horse and criticized the borough-owned hospital for not offering drugs like ivermectin.

Not surprisingly, livestock supply stores on the Kenai Peninsula have received numerous inquiries about the drug in recent weeks.

Too bad all that interest in stopping COVID from sickening and killing people has not translated into a higher vaccination rate against the virus. The Kenai Peninsula has the third-worst vaccination rate among boroughs in the state, about 15 percentage points below the rate in Wrangell. The Kenai Borough's COVID infection count since March 2020 is almost 11% of its population, more than double Wrangell's.

Looks like people here have more horse sense than the peninsula mayor.