Are you willing to get the Covid vaccine when offered?

Ivermectin does have some anti-viral properties, so it made sense to test it in controlled experiments for effectiveness as a COVID-19 treatment. That's fine.

However, there was no particular reason to believe that it was going to be effective for COVID-19 since it was developed as an anti-fungal medicine, and pretty early on initial clinical trials showed that it was no more effective at treating COVID-19 than a placebo. Further studies affirmed this. This was known pretty early on, so anyone saying that it was an effective treatment was spreading misinformation that increased people's risks. People definitely died because they believed that provably false information.

Basically, some people quickly fell down a rabbit hole where they were determined to first believe it was a hoax, and then there was some easy cure just ready off the shelf and so on. It's tremendously frustrating.

This isn't to say that the government was perfect in handling the pandemic, in messaging and policy. In a nice rational world, we'd have hearings and discussion to do a good thorough examination so we'd do better next time... but I have little faith that we could do that in a productive manner.