To the question of whether Ivermectin is useful as a treatment: I don't know. A skim through Google Scholar certainly suggests it has some promise, and the side-effect profile is mild enough that the risk-reward seems likely to work out.

This question has gotten far too little attention from good intellectuals. A good distillation of the research would be very valuable.

To the question that was asked, about whether you should do advocacy on this topic (in either direction): No. You are not ready.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a long string of incidents where prominent institutions look at something which has a complicated, messy and unclear evidence base, decide they need to take a stance, and either pretend to be confident, or pretend that cost-benefit analysis is impossible so their lack-of-confidence means no one should do anything. This happened with masks early in the pandemic, with the question of whether there's aerosol transmission, with the question of whether there's presymptomatic transmission, with the mRNA vaccines between when the study results came in and when the FDA finally approved them, with the AstraZeneca vaccine and phantom worries about blood clots. The WHO, US CDC, and US FDA all severely tarnished their reputations this way, and it's unlikely they'll earn back trust any time soon.

If the place you start from is that you're going to do public advocacy, but you need to decide whether you're advocating for or advocating against, then it will be hard to engage with a complicated/messy/unclear evidence base and remain honest. You'll be incentivized not to see the situation for what it is.

Suppose there's a 25% chance that Ivermectin works. If you convey that information honestly, that's a good thing to do, but it isn't an advocacy campaign--you're doing useful research, but not advocating a policy position.

Suppose the answer is that ivermectin definitely works, but only a little bit--eg, it reduces mortality by 10%. A big chunk of the public thinks it works a lot better than that, and is taking dumb risks on that basis. You'll be tempted to lie to those people.

To the question of how one can form better beliefs about effective medical treatments:

For questions that are not politicized and not fast moving (ie, most things other than COVID-19), use UpToDate to orient, then go to primary-source papers only when you have a specific question in mind, and only when you're kind of desperate.

For questions that are politicized or fast moving (ie, COVID-19 treatments), where you're doing original distillation work: use Wikipedia to orient on the relevant biology and terminology, then collect primary-source studies from PubMed, Google Scholar, and (for COVID-19 in particular) medrxiv. You have to be pretty systematic about it, since the number of usable studies tends to be small enough that accidentally omitting one is a big deal. You'll need to know how to reliably bypass the paywalls (mostly Sci-Hub), and how to judge reliability based on a methodology section.

Ivermectin (drug)