Did the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approve ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 in April 2025? No, that's not true: We found no mention of any such approval on the website of the FDA or HHS, or on either entity's social media accounts. An FDA guide stipulating that the agency did not recommend ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 remained unedited for more than a year.
The claim appeared in an April 23, 2025, post on X (archived here), which read:
The FDA has now approved Ivermectin for 'Covid' - 5 years and 5,500,000,000 experimental injections too late.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot)
An online FDA guide to claims around the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 says the following:
The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals.
The FDA has determined that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID 19 in humans.
That page was last updated in April 2024, and has therefore not been changed since the beginning of the Trump administration on January 21, 2024.
Furthermore, we checked the FDA's list of drug approvals, and found no recent additions to the section relating to ivermectin, which is approved by the FDA for use, in humans, only as a treatment for "intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis" and "external parasites like head lice and for skin conditions such as rosacea."
An April 23, 2025 search of the websites of the FDA, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), yielded no results that corroborated the claim that the FDA had approved ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Finally, we checked the Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X and LinkedIn accounts of both the FDA and HHS, and again found no trace or mention of a new FDA approval for ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment.
If the FDA had approved ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, something that advocates have fervently proposed for years, it would undoubtedly have formed the basis of widespread news coverage.
However, an April 23 Google News search for the words "FDA", "ivermectin" and "COVID" yielded no relevant results, meaning that not only had the FDA not officially announced any ivermectin-related approvals, but news organisations were not even reporting an imminent such approval, citing anonymous sources or leaks.
