The "does hydroxychloroquine work, does ivermectin work" are all valid questions. The problem is people making big conclusions on tiny studies that didn't stand up to larger statistical trials - just as we're seeing here - and also the fact that people refused to drop it once the evidence contradicted their positions.
I find the "horse paste" and "aquarium cleaner" memes to be very irritating though, they are FDA approved drugs. Yes, it hasn't gone through the human-medicine supply chain, but veterinary medicine needs to be just as pure as human medicine. Also, "aquarium cleaner" and other products are often sold wink-nudge with the tacit understanding that there are a lot of people who don't have health insurance (or have health insurance that's terrible) and can't get access to actual drugs and this is the only way for them to get access to life-saving medications. There are people who literally need to take "aquarium cleaner" to live, because they have lupus and that's what they can get. Same for "fish mox" which is routinely taken by people who can't afford to go to a doctor and get actual amoxicillin. In both cases, it needs to be very pure, if there were contaminants it would instantly kill exotic fish, just like veterinary medicine needs to be pure, contaminants will kill your dog or horse the same as a human.
Like it or not that's a grey-market supply chain that has existed for a while and nobody wants to actually address the problem of making sure that people have universal access to medical care (not just insurance, that's not sufficient as you can see right now). So people take aquarium cleaner to stay alive. Welcome to America.
The problem there is people self-administering huge doses that are far out of clinical standards. And that's something I'm perfectly fine mocking - if you are gonna self-prescribe for something the drug is not approved for, and you take a massive dose that makes you uncontrollably shit yourself, yeah that one's on you buddy. And that would happen even if they sourced human drugs from a pharmacy.
The problem as far as messaging is that the above stuff doesn't sink in with the general public. They won't listen to "the evidence says HCQ and ivermectin don't work", Republicans say it does, and they will trust Trump over doctors. But there's a chance they will listen if they get constantly mocked for taking horse paste. As far as messaging, it's probably the correct strategy even if we here all know it's not intellectually honest.
And yeah the FDA has gotten themselves in trouble with mixed messaging in the past, like saying the evidence showed that masks didn't work, in order to manipulate the public into not buying them to preserve the supply for health care providers (lmao at the idea of that ever working, and lmao that they thought they could pull it off without destroying their credibility). In this case mocking people for taking horse paste isn't really wrong though, it's a flat-out bad idea and if this is the approach that wakes them up, oh well.
Intellectually irritating but I get it. I'm not the target audience here.