Like I get that ivermectin can be harmful and isn’t meant for COVID w/e.
But I also know a lot of houseless people and uninsured that have relied on animal medication when human medication was inaccessible to them due to the cost. Is it safe or advised? No. But it’s nice to not have to choose between medication and eating when you’re sick and poor.
This whole “lol they take horse meds they’re dumb” is a bad way to angle your argument IMO as it can be leveraged to punch down. And we need to be thinking critically about what kind of laws can come from encouraging takes like this. I don’t want to limit anyone’s access to affordable medicine even if some people abuse that access to get diarrhea.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be attacking the problem on some intrinsic “human taking animal meds bad” but more on the reasons people do it? Because all of this links back to the bigger problem that America doesn’t have adequate healthcare for its people. And, I would argue, that leveraging the discussion from that logic would add more weight to our cause and help more people see the inherent evils that are contributing to this. (Namely American healthcare interest groups)
Thoughts?
I'm very much against taking animal medicine that is proven to be worthless as a cure and highly dangerous to humans, especially when you've got better options.
The people eating horse paste have better options in the form of a covid vaccine. Even in a country as cartoonishly evil as the US, covid vaccines are free and easy to get.
Except for the apple flavour there is no good reason to eat horse paste.
I do get how Americans get to distrust the medical profession though. US health insurance is effectively a protection racket and the profit motive tempts healthcare providers to over-treat patients. Meanwhile ghoulish healthcare capitalists are jacking up prices and buying off politicians to avoid regulation.
So healthcare is prohibitively expensive and the people behind it are scammers and vampires. At the same time you hear about how people use various folk remedies successfully, effectively outsmarting the drug companies by for instance successfully treating infections with antibiotics for fish.
Then you couple this with the identitarian right's baseline anti-intellectualism and petty self-aggrandizing individualism and you get the notion that these coastal elite liberal so-called experts shouldn't tell you what to do. You're just as smart as them! Unlike them you know the real world! And then eating horse paste transforms from being just a folk remedy to also being a cultural issue, a way to trigger the libs, a part of your identity.