Decades of use with nearly four billion doses to humans preceded recent use with COVID patients. From the chapter ‘Ivermectin sends COVID to lockdown,’ in my book The Defeat Of COVID. Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization (WHO) List of Essential Medicines and is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  This well-tolerated but potent anti-parasitic medicine has been prescribed billions of times in its 36-year history against a wide range of parasites. It is a drug in the avermectin family, so named because those compounds are produced by the soil organism Streptomyces avermitilis.   It has also been studied and used against a wide range of viruses especially over the last decade, and there is evidence of potent antiviral effects against Influenza A and over a dozen other viruses tested. [309]…