On Sunday, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared, "We've been seeing health misinformation as a problem for years, but the speed, scale and sophistication with which it is spreading and impacting our health is really unprecedented."

Perhaps the surgeon general should look in the mirror and lecture the FDA for dissuading people from taking lifesaving ivermectin. Over the weekend, the FDA tweeted out a message warning that ivermectin is for horses and cows, not people, implying that it is dangerous to consume and is not approved for humans.

Evidently, officials believe that millions of human beings in Africa (not to mention thousands in the Western world) are no better than animals.

Ivermectin has been dispensed 3.7 billion times in African countries since 1987 and is regarded as one of the greatest cures of all time for a disease ailing human beings. Here are the facts.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after pesticides were sidelined from use in Africa following the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," onchocerciasis, or river blindness, was devastating many central African countries. An estimated 50% of males 40 years and older had been blinded by the disease in some countries. After ivermectin was discovered as a wonder drug for treating river blindness by William C. Campbell, a scientist for Merck, and Satoshi Omura, a scientist at the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, Merck started the MECTIZAN® Donation Program (MDP). In 1987, when the company was actually dedicated to saving lives as much as to making money, Merck began donating hundreds of millions of doses of MECTIZAN (ivermectin) and essentially eradicated the disease. Over time, 2.8 billion doses were donated.