Now take your logic and apply it to COVID-19.
(many careers were ended. In some cases, states threatened to pull licenses or even imprison researchers for even considering alternatives)
Where?
Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Arizona all threatened to do so, though I have been unable to determine whether any licenses were actually pulled.
California threatened criminal charges, though I have no evidence that any were ever actually filed.
People who acted in bad faith on data that was demonstrably bad were rightly defenestrated by the medical and scientific community. However many of those same people found themselves right at home in a new cheer squad of people who are more than happy to invest in beliefs over data. The mop up on the shitty evidence is drawing to a conclusion, with events such as the recent NEJM publishing of the ivermectin study. But stupid knows no bounds and the scientific method is going to be mopping up the damage from this one for a long time
It just turned out not to work. I don't know of any evidence that trying it, when we had literally nothing else, did anybody any harm. All the harm came from people using it instead of, later, doing the things that did turn out to actually work. Probably a few people even cleared up a chronic worm infection they didn't know about.
What I did not see, and expected to see, was a study of relative infection rates in people already on ivermectin for an on-label use vs. people who were not. These came out pretty early vis a vis chloroquines, showing that people who had been taking that got COVID-19 just like anybody else. Maybe periodic ivermectin doses wasn't a thing...