Also, said company, Merck, is in the process of releasing a new drug that will cost in the thousands.
Meanwhile, the government pays about $20 per dose of the vaccine. The difference between $12 and $20 is not substantial.
Re: vaccines, JP Morgan estimated Pfizer alone will make $100B from vaccines. I don't think manufacturing Ivermectin is complex enough that it would net ANY profit, the effort would be organized completely differently.
Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).
This is not true. Governments were and are being hammered by their inability to manage COVID. There is a massive incentive to find a therapeutic that can treat the infected rather than just a vaccine, which is how crazes surrounding Ivermectin and other unproven therapeutics got started to begin with. Not only that, but generic therapeutics that could be easily manufactured and transported to poorer nations are clearly the best option to solve this problem. Vaccines were the hardest sell and the worst option for governments given their long developmental timeline, the FUD surrounding them, and the clear complexities surrounding distribution and scarcity.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxy...
They call out Simone Gold for posting anti-vax content on Twitter by retweeting Joe Rogan's experience that he got covid and treated it with a cocktail of drugs including Ivermectin. This first hand account of recovery was apparently not true because... Ivermectin isn't shown to be effective.
Joe Rogan's treatment is a single anecdote, and invermectin was one component of a "cocktail." He recovered, yes, but there's more noise than signal and most people recover from covid without any treatment.