Becca Price publishes on teaching students how to recognize disinformation about Ivermectin

Understanding science has become all the more critical to our daily lives since the COVID-19 pandemic started, and students have urgent questions about what has been going on. In response to those questions, faculty member Becca Price and colleagues Anzela Niraula and Vasudha Sundaravaradan, developed a lesson to teach students about misinformation around COVID treatments (Niraula et al. 2023). In “Good Drug, Bad Practice: Tackling the Ivermectin Fiasco,” students explore how incorrect and intentionally misleading statements have endangered people. So many folks bought into this information, that they sought Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID.

This lesson teaches the basic biology of Ivermectin as a drug and how it is incompatible with COVID—it works on nervous systems, and so can’t work on viruses which don’t even have cells. In the lesson, students also look at a fraudulent report that made up a connection between Ivermectin and COVID.