Indonesia jumps the gun on Ivermectin as Covid cure

JAKARTA – Still under police investigation for the alleged illegal importation last year of the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin to use as a potential weapon against the Covid-19 pandemic, philanthropist Haryoseno has learned a bitter lesson. “In this world,” he says, “to do good and help people isn’t easy.”

As the owner of pharmaceutical firm Harsen Laboratories, Haryoseno’s crime was to hand out free samples of Ivermectin, mostly to charitable groups, while he waited more than a year for the government to issue him with a license to manufacture and sell the drug.

In the meantime, with Covid-19 on the rampage, Ivermectin had become a hot seller on the black market after clinical trials in Australia and the United States showed that as effective as it was against parasites, it also helped prevent the virus from reproducing.

Doctors at state hospitals have already been prescribing the broad-spectrum drug and empirical evidence suggests it is now being widely used, even among directors in corporate boardrooms, both as a prophylactic and also at the first onset of the disease.

The jury is still out on Ivermectin’s Covid efficacy and will be another five or six months before the Indonesian Health Ministry receives the results of its own trials reportedly being conducted among 10,000-20,000 patients in ten state-run hospitals.