By the time Joe Rogan had contracted COVID-19 and announced his decision to treat it with ivermectin, the drug had already become popular with the intellectual dark web and conspiracy-inclined conservatives. The celebrity podcaster may have been making a shrewd brand-management calculation, but plenty of ordinary people have also bought into ivermectin as a cure for COVID, with many flocking to farm supply stores to buy the livestock version of the drug, colloquially termed “horse paste.”

It’s easy to laugh at Rogan and the legions of horse paste customers. But the widespread willingness to use off-label treatments and drugs formulated for animals is evidence not of individual stupidity, but rather of deadly problems with our system of privatized medicine.

The popularity of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine before it reveal the effects of a pharmaceutical industry built on extracting as much profit as possible from lifesaving medication. In this context, people are more than used to mistrusting the medical establishment and finding their own remedies. Liberals may laugh at them or admonish them, but people’s mass willingness to take unproven COVID treatments, even ones not meant for our species, is based on the inequities created by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies.