“My name is William Campbell, in 2015 I won the Nobel Prize in medicine for the discovery of Ivermectin. It cures many diseases including covid-19. The fake news and big pharma want you to live in fear. Fauci won’t promote Ivermectin because he is the little parasite it destroys.”

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       — quote attributed to Drew University professor William Campbell circulating on social media such as Twitter

       This quote, accompanied by an image of the Nobel laureate, is circulating widely on social media. Juanita Broaddrick, a prominent conservative with 500,000 followers, posted it at 11 a.m. Wednesday and within three hours accumulated more than 12,000 retweets and likes. Other Twitter users have also spread the meme widely.

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       But Barb Bresnahan, chief of staff and dean of administration at Drew University, where Campbell teaches, told The Fact Checker the quote is false and the meme has been reported to Twitter.

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       Like many fake social media posts, there’s a germ of truth, but it’s twisted into a falsehood.

       Campbell, a native of Ireland, did share the Nobel Prize in medicine with Satoshi Omura of Japan for their role in creating a therapy for infections caused by roundworm parasites. “Omura cultured bacteria, which produce substances that inhibit the growth of other microorganisms. In 1978 he succeeded in culturing a strain from which William Campbell purified a substance, avermectin, which in a chemically modified form, ivermectin, proved effective against river blindness and elephantiasis,” the Nobel Prize committee said. Campbell was quoted in April 2020 expressing delight at an early report that the anti-parasite drug might inhibit the novel coronavirus. Since then, there have been continuing efforts to identify whether the relatively low-cost drug would be effective in treating patients with covid-19. Omura in March co-authored a paper said that “although clinical trial results have been and continue to be accumulated showing that ivermectin is effective in the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, basic in vitro findings that can reasonably explain its effectiveness have not yet been obtained.”

       But, to date, there is insufficient evidence that ivermectin can cure covid-19, even though it increasingly has been embraced by vaccine skeptics. There are numerous reports of people being hospitalized because they self-medicated with ivermectin intended for livestock.

       “The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of covid-19 in people or animals. Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications,” the FDA said in a recent statement. “There’s a lot of misinformation around, and you may have heard that it’s okay to take large doses of ivermectin. It is not okay.”

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       The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an Aug. 26 health advisory, noted that “when used as prescribed for approved indications, [ivermectin] is generally safe and well tolerated” but that “during the covid-19 pandemic, ivermectin dispensing by retail pharmacies has increased, as has use of veterinary formulations available over the counter but not intended for human use,” leading to a rise in overdoses.

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