Amazon made a major mistake? Someone has already died!

Recently, foreign media broke a shocking news that an agricultural veterinary drug is actually being sold on Amazon in the name of a special medicine for the new coronavirus!

Ivermectin has long been used as a veterinary drug, generally for deworming large livestock such as cattle and horses, and can also treat some zoonotic diseases caused by parasites. Recently, Facebook and Twitter have been spreading rumors that ivermectin can effectively fight the new coronavirus, which has caused offline pharmacies to frequently sell out of ivermectin. The out-of-stock situation, in turn, has given some hesitant people the motivation to buy it, further deifying the role of ivermectin. This unpopular veterinary drug, which is usually ignored, has suddenly become popular and hard to find.

At this moment, our protagonist Amazon popped up and said, "I heard that this medicine is very popular recently. If you can't buy it offline, you can buy it online!"

Therefore, as long as customers type "iv" in the Amazon search box, they will automatically think of various ivermectin products, and even ivermectin has been listed under products related to the new crown (COVID-19)! The media directly characterized this as "Amazon guides people to buy ivermectin as a new crown treatment drug", and this hype has made this a big deal!

Although I believe that Amazon did not do it on purpose, but because there are too many related searches, the algorithm captured a large amount of data and chose to guide customers to ivermectin products. However, the impact is too bad, guiding customers to buy completely ineffective veterinary drugs. And it will not have no impact just because the medicine has no effect. Because Amazon has misled consumers, they bought ineffective drugs and delayed normal treatment, resulting in serious consequences.

Caleb Wallace, a well-known anti-mask activist in Texas, died of COVID-19 at the age of 30. He had previously said, "I think I care more about freedom than my personal health." He firmly opposed the government's mask-wearing and lockdown strategies, believing that this violated people's rights and interests and was useless.

On July 26, Wallace began to show symptoms of the new coronavirus, but he refused to go to the hospital for testing and treatment. He took a large amount of vitamin C, aspirin zinc capsules, and ivermectin purchased at offline pharmacies and Amazon. These drugs were of course useless. Eventually, his condition rapidly deteriorated last month and he unfortunately passed away last weekend.

This incident has caused an uproar in foreign media, and the entire network has begun to criticize Amazon for the adverse consequences of its guidance on ivermectin.

This is just a case of a little-known person getting into trouble and attracting attention. There must be a large number of American consumers who blindly believed in the effects of ivermectin getting into trouble. Amazon played a very bad role in this, allowing these people to easily search and buy ivermectin.

After a large number of media exposures, Amazon has urgently withdrawn the search association between ivermectin and COVID-19, and when searching for ivermectin, a prompt box will pop up clearly to tell consumers that "FDA recommends not using ivermectin to treat or prevent Covid-19"

But the situation has become very serious. Rumors about ivermectin are still spreading wildly on social platforms, and consumers who are unable to buy it offline are still flocking to Amazon one after another. Look at the comments under these ivermectin products, all of them are touting the efficacy of ivermectin. And even though Amazon has set sensitive words here, any comments involving COVID-19 cannot be displayed, there are still people in the review that allude to the treatment of the new crown.

(Ivermectin is hard to buy, but it is very effective in eliminating

Something I can’t say here)

The adverse impact caused by this incident is still continuing. As long as ivermectin is still sold normally, it will be difficult for Amazon to prevent consumers from placing orders for the purpose of treating COVID-19. With Amazon's business thinking, it is difficult to improve the push mechanism of this algorithm. It is definitely not the first time that an algorithm like this has unintentionally done evil. The US antitrust bill this time requires Amazon to rectify its push mechanism for a similar purpose, requiring or even forcing Amazon to modify the algorithm from the perspective of public and social interests.

For Amazon itself, this can be considered a black swan event. There is nothing wrong with pushing what consumers want, but is it Amazon’s responsibility to manage if what they want harms them? Amazon itself probably doesn’t understand this. In short, this incident will definitely have a huge impact on Amazon’s search and related recommendation algorithms. The official will definitely optimize the display algorithm in a targeted manner and add more considerations. Sellers probably have to revisit the algorithm rules again.