HIDING IVERMECTIN AT THE WALMART

I coordinate a group of community gardens in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This afternoon, I was in a Walmart buying feed for our flock of 21 egg-laying hens. The 20 pound woven plastic feed bags are stacked/stashed along the bottom rack in the quiet, low-traffic Pet Food section along the back wall of the store.

As my eyes wandered to and quickly away from, the shelf above, the word "Ivermectin" flashed into my head.  I thought, "Wait, did I just see ‘Ivermectin?’ Maybe I've been thinking too much about this Scamdemic."

I looked again.  Like a mouse you see out of the corner of your eye late at night, if you think you saw it, you saw it. There was a 1 x 6 inch thin cardboard package of Ivermectin Horse Paste, Apple Flavor.  Behind it were four more such packages squeezed, like an afterthought and a non-sequitur, between, and dwarfed by, sacks of rabbit and dog food. 

It seemed obvious that the addition of Ivermectin was a reaction to market demand, and not by horse owners. New Brunswick is a small, but densely packed city, surrounded by crowded suburbs. This Walmart is miles from any horse I know about.

Typically, Walmart items have postage stamp-sized tags with product names and prices affixed to the shelves beneath them. There was no such tag beneath the paste. The Ivermectin packages had a small, color illustration of a horsehead. The product’s label repeatedly, bold-facedly emphasized that it was “INTENDED ONLY FOR HORSES.” While the back of the box was jammed with words, “human” was not one of them; the word seemed conspicuous by its absence. It felt like the package was winking at me. I was reminded of Mr. Ed.

I’ve been to Nicaragua three times. Nicaragua is free-form in many ways: repainted, repurposed US school buses inhumanely packed with humans and carrying pigs and chickens on their roofs; part-time, vinyl tabled and chaired restaurants in peoples’ tiny living rooms; unadorned, cinderblock walled, corrugated zinc roof hotel rooms with concrete floors and no furniture except a bed ($14/night); barefoot baseball games with madres pitching overhand; springy 175 cc dirt bikes carrying 1-5 riders and surf-heavy beaches alongside thick jungles.

Every Nicaraguan town of any size has an otherwise nameless “FARMACIA.” These stay open late and, unlike US Walgreens, sell nothing but a wide array of prescription medications. Except that no prescriptions are required. The thinly-veiled therapeutic along Walmart’s back wall felt to me like a tiny, subversive First World slice of a Nicaraguan farmacia. Assess your own needs and risks. Pay cash, without flashing an Rx card. I strongly suspect the Farmacias sell Ivermectin and HCQ: cheap. Insurance can badly distort markets.

I placed the horse paste package in my shopping cart next to the bags of chicken feed. Then I moved to Toys, selected a bike tire pump and wound my way to the register, passing dazed-looking, overweight people wearing cloth or paper on their faces. Waiting in a characteristically understaffed line, I wondered, “If chickens PCR test positive for Coronavirus, will the government mandate that we vaxx them all?”

I put the chix feed and pump on the checkout belt. Then I asked the checker, a middle-aged man named Suresh, to scan the paste to learn its price: 8 dollars, 12 cents. A tiny fraction of the cost of one PCR test or one “vaxx” dose—and probably much more cost effective than multiple rounds of each “state of the art” medical practice. Infinitely less than 6 trillion dollars in federal Covid subsidies in the past 19 months; that’s roughly the same amount, adjusted for inflation, as the US spent to win World War II in both Europe and Asia. Somehow, we didn’t get nearly same return on our 2020-21 investment. And the guys sent across oceans to die in WWII were young, fit and brave.

I opted not to buy the paste.  I’ll go back next week. Maybe they will have restocked by then. I heard the strawberry kind tastes better.