US Cancer Institute Studying Ivermectin’s ‘Ability To Kill Cancer Cells’

The National Cancer Institute, the federal research agency charged with leading the war against the nation’s second-largest killer, is studying ivermectin as a potential cancer treatment, according to its top official.

“There are enough reports of it, enough interest in it, that we actually did — ivermectin, in particular — did engage in sort of a better preclinical study of its properties and its ability to kill cancer cells,” said Anthony Letai, a physician the Trump administration appointed as NCI director in September.

Letai did not cite new evidence that might have prompted the institute to research the effectiveness of the antiparasitic drug against cancer. The drug, largely used to treat people or animals for infections caused by parasites, is a popular dewormer for horses.

“We’ll probably have those results in a few months,” Letai said. “So we are taking it seriously.”

He spoke about ivermectin at a Jan. 30 event, “Reclaiming Science: The People’s NIH,” with National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and other senior agency officials at Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel. The MAHA Institute hosted the discussion, framed by the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The National Cancer Institute is the largest of the NIH’s 27 branches.

During the covid pandemic, ivermectin’s popularity surged as fringe medical groups promoted it as an effective treatment. Clinical trials have found it isn’t effective against covid.

Ivermectin has become a symbol of resistance against the medical establishment among MAHA adherents and conservatives. Like-minded commentators and wellness and other online influencers have hyped — without evidence — ivermectin as a miracle cure for a host of diseases, including cancer. Trump officials have pointed to research on ivermectin as an example of the administration’s receptiveness to ideas the scientific establishment has rejected.

“If lots of people believe it and it’s moving public health, we as NIH have an obligation, again, to treat it seriously,” Bhattacharya said at the event. According to The Chronicle at Duke University, Bhattacharya recently said he wants the NIH to be “the research arm of MAHA.”

The decision by the world’s premier cancer research institute to study ivermectin as a cancer treatment has alarmed career scientists at the agency.

“I am shocked and appalled,” one NCI scientist said. “We are moving funds away from so much promising research in order to do a preclinical study based on nonscientific ideas. It’s absurd.”

KFF Health News granted the scientist and other NCI workers anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press and fear retaliation.

HHS and the National Cancer Institute did not answer KFF Health News’ questions on the amount of money the cancer institute is spending on the study, who is carrying it out, and whether there was new evidence that prompted NCI to look into ivermectin as an anticancer therapy. Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, said NIH is dedicated to “rigorous, gold-standard research,” something the administration has repeatedly professed.

A preclinical study is an early phase of research conducted in a lab to test whether a drug or treatment may be useful and to assess potential harms. These studies take place before human clinical trials.

The scientist questioned whether there is enough initial evidence to warrant NCI’s spending of taxpayer funds to investigate the drug’s potential as a cancer treatment.

The FDA has approved ivermectin for certain uses in humans and animals. Tablets are used to treat conditions caused by parasitic worms, and the FDA has approved ivermectin lotions to treat lice and rosacea. Two scientists involved in its discovery won the Nobel Prize in 2015, tied to the drug’s success in treating certain parasitic diseases.

The FDA has warned that large doses of ivermectin can be dangerous. Overdoses can cause seizures, comas, or death.

Kennedy, supporters of the MAHA movement, and some conservative commentators have promoted the idea that the government and pharmaceutical companies quashed ivermectin and other inexpensive, off-patent drugs because they’re not profitable for the drug industry.

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy wrote in an October 2024 X post that has since gone viral. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

Previous laboratory research has shown that ivermectin could have anticancer effects because it promotes cell death and inhibits the growth of tumor cells. “It actually has been studied both with NIH funds and outside of NIH funds,” Letai said.

However, there is no evidence that ivermectin is safe and effective in treating cancer in humans. Preliminary data from a small clinical trial that gave ivermectin to patients with one type of metastatic breast cancer, in combination with immunotherapy, found no significant benefit from the addition of ivermectin.

Some physicians are concerned that patients will delay or forgo effective cancer treatments, or be harmed in other ways, if they believe unfounded claims that ivermectin can treat their disease.

“Many, many, many things work in a test tube. Quite a few things work in a mouse or a monkey. It still doesn’t mean it’s going to work in people,” said Jeffery Edenfield, executive medical director of oncology for the South Carolina-based Prisma Health Cancer Institute.

Edenfield said cancer patients ask him about ivermectin “regularly,” mostly because of what they see on social media. He said he persuaded a patient to stop using it, and a colleague recently had a patient who decided “to forgo highly effective standard therapy in favor of ivermectin.”

“People come to the discussion having largely already made up their mind,” Edenfield said.

“We’re in this delicate time when there’s sort of a fundamental mistrust of medicine,” he added. “Some people are just not going to believe me. I just have to keep trying.”

A June letter by clinicians at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio detailed how an adolescent patient with metastatic bone cancer started taking ivermectin “after encountering social media posts touting its benefits.” The patient — who hadn’t been given a prescription by a clinician — experienced ivermectin-related neurotoxicity and had to seek emergency care because of nausea, fatigue, and other symptoms.

“We urge the pediatric oncology community to advocate for sensible health policy that prioritizes the well-being of our patients,” the clinicians wrote.

The lack of evidence about ivermectin and cancer hasn’t stopped celebrities and online influencers from promoting the notion that the drug is a cure-all. On a January 2025 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, actor Mel Gibson claimed that a combination of drugs that included ivermectin cured three friends with stage 4 cancer. The episode has been viewed more than 12 million times.

Lawmakers in a handful of states have made the drug available over the counter. And Florida — which, under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, has become a hotbed for anti-vaccine policies and the spread of public health misinformation — announced last fall that the state plans to fund research to study the drug as a potential cancer treatment.

The Florida Department of Health did not respond to questions about that effort.

Letai, previously a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute oncologist, started at the National Cancer Institute after months of upheaval caused by Trump administration policies.

“What you’re hearing at the NIH now is an openness to ideas — even ideas that scientists would say, ‘Oh, there’s no way it could work’ — but nevertheless applying rigorous scientific methods to those ideas,” Bhattacharya said at the Jan. 30 event.

A second NCI scientist, who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said the notion that NIH was not open to investigating the value of off-label drugs in cancer is “ridiculous.”

“This is not a new idea they came up with,” the scientist said.

Letai didn’t elaborate on whether NCI scientists are conducting the research or if it has directed funding to an outside institution. Three-quarters of the cancer institute’s research dollars go to outside scientists.

He also aimed to temper expectations.

“At least on a population level,” Letai said, “it’s not going to be a cure-all for cancer.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo

Rebekah Stewart, a nurse at the U.S. Public Health Service, got a call last April that brought her to tears. She had been selected for deployment to the Trump administration’s new immigration detention operation at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

This posting combined Donald Trump’s longtime passion to use the offshore base to move “some bad dudes” out of the United States with a promise made shortly after his inauguration last year to hold thousands of noncitizens there. The naval base is known for the torture and inhumane treatment of men suspected of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

“Deployments are typically not something you can say no to,” Stewart said. She pleaded with the coordinating office, which found another nurse to go in her place.

Other public health officers who worked at Guantánamo in the past year described conditions there for the detainees, some of whom learned they were in Cuba from the nurses and doctors sent to care for them. They treated immigrants detained in a dark prison called Camp 6, where no sunlight filters in, said the officers, whom KFF Health News agreed not to name because they fear retaliation for speaking publicly. It previously held people with suspected ties to al-Qaida. The officers said they were not briefed ahead of time on the details of their potential duties at the base.

Although the Public Health Service is not a branch of the U.S. armed forces, its uniformed officers — roughly 5,000 doctors, nurses, and other health workers — act like stethoscope-wearing soldiers in emergencies. The government deploys them during hurricanes, wildfires, mass shootings, and measles outbreaks. In the interim, they fill gaps at an alphabet soup of government agencies.

The Trump administration’s mass arrests to curb immigration have created a new type of health emergency as the number of people detained reaches record highs. About 71,000 immigrants are currently imprisoned, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, which shows that most have no criminal record.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said: “President Donald Trump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst.” However, several news organizations have reported that many of the men shipped to the base had no criminal convictions. As many as 90% of them were described as “low-risk” in a May progress report from ICE.

In fits and starts, the Trump administration has sent about 780 noncitizens to Guantánamo Bay, according to The New York Times. Numbers fluctuate as new detainees arrive and others are returned to the U.S. or deported.

While some Public Health Service officers have provided medical care to detained immigrants in the past, this is the first time in American history that Guantánamo has been used to house immigrants who had been living in the U.S. Officers said ICE postings are getting more common. After dodging Guantánamo, Stewart was instructed to report to an ICE detention center in Texas.

“Public health officers are being asked to facilitate a man-made humanitarian crisis,” she said.

Seeing no option to refuse deployments that she found objectionable, Stewart resigned after a decade of service. She would give up the prospect of a pension offered after 20 years.

“It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make,” she said. “It was my dream job.”

One of her PHS colleagues, nurse Dena Bushman, grappled with a similar moral dilemma when she got a notice to report to Guantánamo a few weeks after the shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August. Bushman, who was posted with the CDC, got a medical waiver delaying her deployment on account of stress and grief. She considered resigning, then did.

“This may sound extreme,” Bushman said. “But when I was making this decision, I couldn’t help but think about how the people who fed those imprisoned in concentration camps were still part of the Nazi regime.”

Others have resigned, but many officers remain. While they are alarmed by Trump’s tactics, detained people need care, multiple PHS officers told KFF Health News.

“We do the best we can to provide care to people in this shit show,” said a PHS nurse who worked in detention facilities last year.

“I respect people and treat them like humans,” she said. “I try to be a light in the darkness, the one person that makes someone smile in this horrible mess.”

The PHS officers conceded that their power to protect people was limited in a detention system fraught with overcrowding, disorganization, and the psychological trauma of uncertainty, family separations, and sleep deprivation.

“Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” said Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in an emailed statement to KFF Health News.

Adm. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Public Health Service, said in an email: “Our duty is clear: say “Yes Sir!”, salute smartly, and execute the mission: show up, provide humane care, and protect health.” Christine is a recent appointee who, until recently, was a urologist specializing in testosterone and male fertility issues.

“In pursuit of subjective morality or public displays of virtue,” he added, “we risk abandoning the very individuals we pledged to serve.”

Into the Unknown

In the months before Stewart resigned, she reflected on her previous deployments, during Trump’s first term, to immigration processing centers run by Customs and Border Protection. Fifty women were held in a single concrete cell in Texas, she recalled.

“The most impactful thing I could do was to convince the guards to allow the women, who had been in there for a week, to shower,” she said. “I witnessed suffering without having much ability to address it.”

Stewart spoke with Bushman and other PHS officers who were embedded at the CDC last year. They assisted with the agency’s response to ongoing measles outbreaks, with sexually transmitted infection research, and more. Their roles became crucial last year as the Trump administration laid off droves of CDC staffers.

Stewart, Bushman, and a few other PHS officers at the CDC said they met with middle managers to ask for details about the deployments: If they went to Guantánamo and ICE facilities, how much power would they have to provide what they considered medically necessary care? If they saw anything unethical, how could they report it? Would it be investigated? Would they be protected from reprisal?

Stewart and Bushman said they were given a PHS office phone number they could call if they had a complaint while on assignment. Otherwise, they said, their questions went unanswered. They resigned and so never went to Guantánamo.

PHS officers who were deployed to the base told KFF Health News they weren’t given details about their potential duties — or the standard operating procedure for medical care — before they arrived.

Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army general and a psychiatrist who has advised on medical care at Guantánamo for two decades, said that was troubling. Before health workers deploy, he said, they should understand what they’ll be expected to do.

The consequences of insufficient preparation can be severe. In 2014, the Navy threatened to court-martial one of its nurses at Guantánamo who refused to force-feed prisoners on hunger strike, who were protesting inhumane treatment and indefinite detention. The protocol was brutal: A person was shackled to a five-point restraint chair as nurses shoved a tube for liquid food into their stomach through their nostrils.

“He wasn’t given clear guidance in advance on how these procedures would be conducted at Guantánamo,” Xenakis said of the nurse. “Until he saw it, he didn’t understand how painful it was for detainees.”

The American Nurses Association and Physicians for Human Rights sided with the nurse, saying his objection was guided by professional ethics. After a year, the military dropped the charges.

A uniformed doctor or nurse’s power tends to depend on their rank, their supervisor, and chains of command, Xenakis said. He helped put an end to some inhumane practices at Guantánamo more than a decade ago, when he and other retired generals and admirals publicly objected to certain interrogation techniques, such as one called “walling,” in which interrogators slammed the heads of detainees suspected of terrorism against a wall, causing slight concussions. Xenakis argued that science didn’t support “walling” as an effective means of interrogation, and that it was unethical, amounting to torture.

Torture hasn’t been reported from Guantánamo’s immigration operation, but ICE shift reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the government watchdog group American Oversight note concerns about detainees resorting to hunger strikes and self-harm.

“Welfare checks with potential hunger strike IA’s,” short for illegal aliens, says an April 30 note from a contractor working with ICE. “In case of a hunger strike or other emergencies,” the report adds, the PHS and ICE are “coordinating policies and procedures.”

“De-escalation of potential pod wide hunger strike/potential riot,” says an entry from July 8. “Speak with alien on suicide watch regarding well being.”

Inmates and investigations have reported delayed medical care at immigration detention facilities and dangerous conditions, including overcrowding and a lack of sanitation. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year in two decades.

“They are arresting and detaining more people than their facilities can support,” one PHS officer told KFF Health News. The most prevalent problem the officer saw among imprisoned immigrants was psychological. They worried about never seeing their families again or being sent back to a country where they feared they’d be killed. “People are scared out of their minds,” the officer said.

No Sunlight

The PHS officers who were at Guantánamo told KFF Health News that the men they saw were detained in either low-security barracks, with a handful of people per room, or in Camp 6, a dark, high-security facility without natural light. The ICE shift reports describe the two stations by their position on the island, Leeward for the barracks and Windward for Camp 6. About 50 Cuban men sent to Guantánamo in December and January have languished at Camp 6.

A Navy hospital on the base mainly serves the military and other residents who aren’t locked up — and in any case, its capabilities are limited, the officers said. To reduce the chance of expensive medical evacuations back to the U.S. to see specialists quickly, they said, the immigrants were screened before being shipped to Guantánamo. People over age 60 or who needed daily drugs to manage diabetes and high blood pressure, for example, were generally excluded. Still, the officers said, some detainees have had to be evacuated back to Florida.

PHS nurses and doctors said they screened immigrants again when they arrived and provided ongoing care, fielding complaints including about gastrointestinal distress and depression. One ICE monthly progress report says, “The USPHS psychologist started an exercise group” for detainees.

Doctors’ requests for lab work were often turned down because of logistical hurdles, partly due to the number of agencies working together on the base, the officers said. Even a routine test, a complete blood count, took weeks to process, versus hours in the U.S.

DHS and the Department of Defense, which have coordinated on the Guantánamo immigration operation, did not respond to requests for comment about their work there.

One PHS officer who helped medically screen new detainees said they were often surprised to learn they were at Guantánamo.

“I’d tell them, ‘I’m sorry you are here,’” the officer said. “No one freaked out. It was like the ten-millionth time they had been transferred.” Some of the men had been detained in various facilities for five or six months and said they wanted to return to their home countries, according to the officer. Health workers had neither an answer nor a fix.

Unlike ICE detention facilities in the U.S., Guantánamo hasn’t been overcrowded. “I have never been so not busy at work,” one officer said. A military base on a tropical island, Guantánamo offers activities such as snorkeling, paddleboard yoga, and kickboxing to those who aren’t imprisoned. Even so, the officer said they would rather be home than on this assignment on the taxpayer’s dime.

Transporting staff and supplies to the island and maintaining them on-base is enormously expensive. The government paid an estimated $16,500 per day, per detainee at Guantánamo, to hold those accused of terrorism, according to a 2025 Washington Post analysis of DOD data. (The average cost to detain immigrants in ICE facilities in the U.S. is $157 a day.)

Even so, the funding has skyrocketed: Congress granted ICE a record $78 billion for fiscal year 2026, a staggering increase from $9.9 billion in 2024 and $6.5 billion nearly a decade ago.

Last year, the Trump administration also diverted more than $2 billion from the national defense budget to immigration operations, according to a report from congressional Democrats. About $60 million of it went to Guantánamo.

“Detaining noncitizens at Guantanamo is far more costly and logistically burdensome than holding them in ICE detention facilities within the United States,” wrote Deborah Fleischaker, a former assistant director at ICE, in a declaration submitted as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union early last year. In December, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a separate ACLU case questioning the legality of detaining immigrants outside the U.S.

Anne Schuchat, who served with the PHS for 30 years before retiring in 2018, said PHS deployments to detention centers may cost the nation in terms of security, too. “A key concern has always been to have enough of these officers available for public health emergencies,” she said.

Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said the immigration deployments don’t affect the public health service’s potential response to other emergencies.

In the past, PHS officers have stood up medical shelters during hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas, rolled out covid testing in the earliest months of the pandemic, and provided crisis support after the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Boston Marathon bombing.

“It’s important for the public to be aware of how many government resources are being used so that the current administration can carry out this one agenda,” said Stewart, one of the nurses who resigned. “This one thing that’s probably turning us into the types of countries we have fought wars against.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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