How many hospitalizations and deaths have been linked to taking animal ivermectin since 2020?

1. Poison-center surge: the clearest piece of the record

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and national poison-control data show a clear surge in human exposures reported for ivermectin during the pandemic: poison centers logged a three-fold increase in January 2021 and a five-fold increase by July 2021 compared with pre-pandemic baselines, and the American Association of Poison Control Centers recorded 1,143 ivermectin exposure calls from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, 2021 — a 163% increase over the prior year — with many calls involving products intended for animals ^{[1] [3]}.

2. Hospital visits and hospitalizations: reported increases, but no national summed figure

CDC warned that those increased poison-control reports were “associated with increased frequency of adverse effects and emergency department/hospital visits,” and the FDA states it received “multiple reports of patients who have required medical attention, including hospitalization, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for animals” — but neither source provides a single nationwide tally of hospitalizations attributable solely to animal-formulation ivermectin since 2020 ^{[1] [2]}.

3. Deaths: some case reports, but no confirmed national death count in these sources

Pharmacovigilance and case-report reviews note deaths among serious ivermectin reports in contexts that include COVID-related use, with one WHO database analysis summarizing 35 serious cases (including 6 deaths) where ivermectin was the single suspect in the report period studied — but that analysis does not distinguish animal versus human formulation in every case and does not produce a national U.S. death total tied specifically to animal ivermectin since 2020 ^[4]. Other investigative pieces and commentators dispute or seek more granular data (some sources say specific early reported cases involving animal formulations did not result in death), underscoring disagreement about attribution in individual instances ^{[5] [6]}.

4. Why precise attribution is hard: multiple reporting and data gaps

Public-health alerts and later reporting show three key barriers to a reliable aggregated number: poison-center reports often don’t distinguish animal versus human formulations in public summaries, databases (like CDC’s national alert backing data) are sometimes summarized rather than published raw, and pharmacovigilance reports mix clinical contexts (overdose, COVID use, co-ingestions, endemic parasitic infections) that complicate cause attribution. Critics and alternative reports note the original alerts aggregated different formulations and case types, making a clean, retrospective count difficult from publicly available summaries ^{[7] [1] [4]}.

5. What the medical and public-health consensus says about risk

Major clinical and public-health organizations warned against using veterinary ivermectin for COVID-19 because animal formulations are concentrated, contain inactive ingredients not evaluated for human use, and can cause severe toxicity — nausea, neurologic effects, coma and even death — and multiple organizations reported increased dispensing, exposures and adverse events during the pandemic ^{[8] [2] [9] [10]}.

6. Conflicting narratives and contested numbers

Some commentators and fringe reports argue that few or no deaths resulted from ivermectin use in typical years and dispute the significance of the poison-center call increases; other peer-reviewed analyses and WHO pharmacovigilance reviews document serious adverse events and deaths in temporal association with ivermectin reporting during the pandemic period. Those competing narratives reflect different interpretations of incomplete surveillance data and different thresholds for causal attribution ^{[6] [4]}.

7. What can be done to get a definitive answer

To reach a clear, evidence-based national total you would need access to raw, case-level poison-control and hospital-report data that specifies formulation (animal vs. human), confirms causality or contributory role via clinical review, and aggregates across jurisdictions. Available public sources in this collection do not supply that consolidated dataset or an authoritative national count (available sources do not mention a single summed national total) ^{[3] [1] [2]}.

Limitations and closing note: the reporting cited here documents increases in exposures, emergency visits and some serious events with ivermectin during 2020–2021 and records that hospitals treated people who had taken animal ivermectin, but these sources do not provide a single, validated national number of hospitalizations and deaths linked solely to taking animal ivermectin since 2020 ^{[1] [2] [4]}.