Hello, friends. So I got back from the road Saturday night feeling very weary. I had a headache. And I just felt just run down.

On Wednesday, comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan told his 13 million Instagram followers that he had COVID-19.

So we immediately threw the kitchen sink out of all kinds of meds, monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-Pack.

Ivermectin. It's the latest unproven COVID treatment to blow up the internet.

It's an antiparasitic used to treat things like river blindness and lice in humans, and

quite commonly, worms and other parasites in horses, cows, and dogs.

But now that it's all over the internet, people who can't get a human ivermectin prescription are

trying to get their hands on the veterinary version, something the Food and Drug Administration

is warning against, because animal formulations are different from the ones approved for

humans and can be dangerous. A couple of weeks ago, the agency tweeted, you are not a horse,

you are not a cow. Seriously, y'all, stop it.

You rarely see a government organization tweet in a voice that sounds so much like your own.

That's Brandy Zedrosny, who covers the internet and platforms for NBC News.

Like from the y'all to the just obvious exhaustion at all of this insanity,

like I, that was my tweet. They stole it from my brain.

Brandy spends her days trying to understand why certain things catch hold in certain corners

of the internet. A lot of the time, she says, it's a defensive strategy, a response to something

that could threaten a group's worldview. We've been seeing that so often during the pandemic.

We've just seen the goalposts move and move and move and move.

So today on the show, she's going to do that for us with Ivermectin.

We're going to talk about where it came from, who's pushing it, and why this kind of thing keeps happening.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined.

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