Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 12m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 48.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, lands at Japan’s Atsugi Air Force Base.
Emma Goldberg reports Demand Surges for Deworming Drug for Covid, Despite No Evidence It Works (‘Prescriptions for ivermectin have jumped to more than 88,000 per week, some pharmacists are reporting shortages and people are overdosing on forms of the drug meant for horses’):
For the past week, Dr. Gregory Yu, an emergency physician in San Antonio, has received the same daily requests from his patients, some vaccinated for Covid-19 and others unvaccinated: They ask him for ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms that has repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus.
Dr. Yu has refused the ivermectin requests, he said, but he knows some of his colleagues have not. Prescriptions for ivermectin have seen a sharp rise in recent weeks, jumping to more than 88,000 per week in mid-August from a prepandemic baseline average of 3,600 per week, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some pharmacists are even reporting shortages of the drug. Travis Walthall, a pharmacist in Kuna, Idaho, a town of about 20,000 people, said that this summer alone he had filled more than 20 ivermectin prescriptions, up from two or three in a typical year. For the past week he has not been able to obtain the drug from his suppliers; they were all out.
Mr. Walthall was astonished, he said, at how many people were willing to take an unapproved drug for Covid. “I’m like, gosh, this is horrible,” he said.
….
Though it has not been shown to be effective in treating Covid, people are now clamoring to get the drug, trading tips in Facebook groups and on Reddit. Some physicians have compared the phenomenon to last year’s surge of interest in hydroxychloroquine, though there are more clinical trials evaluating ivermectin.
The Food and Drug Administration weighed in last week. “You are not a horse,” the agency tweeted, with a warning explaining that ivermectin is not F.D.A.-approved for treating or preventing Covid-19 and that taking large doses can cause serious harm.
A recent review of 14 ivermectin studies, with more than 1,600 participants, concluded that none provided evidence of the drug’s ability to prevent Covid, improve patient conditions or reduce mortality. Another 31 studies are still underway to test the drug.
See also Daily Bread for 8.24.21: Ron Johnson’s Push for Ivermectin.