What was the story behind it? I noticed a lot of the anti vax crowd were banging the ivermectin drum but couldn’t work out why. As it was equally untested.
Behind which bit? The preliminary results are out for the TOGETHER trial, which is basically one of the first decent, large scale, good quality trials, to publish it's results and it showed <10% effect for IVM, which is basically a failure, and nowhere near what the pushers said it was. This trial hasn't been fully published or peer-reviewed yet mind, but it's pretty much already confirmed what most thought, from the prelim data.
As for the previous trials, nearly all the positive trials have been taken apart as were using fake data, and in some cases, there wasn't even a trial carried out! A meta-analysis using the "real" trials says it basically doesn't work, they fall like a house of cards without the Elgazzar fake data etc.
Kory has been one of the leading figures, banging the IVM drum for a year, effectively most assume which has been to line his own pockets, and has now started to backtrack on his previous claims, and moved on to pushing some other crap
Anti-vaxers just fell for the narrative, probably stems back from Trump with Hydroxycholoroquine etc, or they just like conspiracies in general.
It's daft as a lot of them aren't against other vaccines (designed with much worse knowledge and tech), but they're against Covid vaccines, which in itself is strange as there's about 5-10 of them, all are proven to work on massive scale, and far better than the alternative. I could maybe understand being against one of them, if it didn't work, but they nearly all do, and the ones that don't, don't get approved, it's simple.
I don't get why someone would want to find some obscure drugs designed for horse worming when they've been told by the WHO for ages that's not likely to work, and that there's vaccines which cut over 95% of deaths etc.
Good news is the TOGETHER trial, showed better results for fluvoxamine, although that was only 30% benefit and still nowhere near what the vaccines are.