Judge: Hospital must use ivermectin
COVID-19 patient sought drug CDC warns against
A suburban Cincinnati woman, whose husband has been on a ventilator at West Chester Hospital with COVID-19, won a court order forcing the hospital to treat her husband’s novel coronavirus infection with an antiparasitic treatment commonly used for livestock.
The case is one of a handful nationwide where courts have sided with family members and forced doctors to use ivermectin, which is unproven in the treatment of COVID-19 and is not recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jeffrey Smith, 51, came down with COVID-19 in early July and has been in the intensive care unit at the UC Healthrun hospital in Butler County for weeks. His wife, Julie Smith, asked on Aug. 20 for the emergency order for the use of ivermectin in Butler County Common Pleas Court.
Judge Gregory Howard gave the goahead on Aug. 23 to Dr. Fred Wagshul’s prescription of 30 milligrams of ivermectin daily for three weeks, as requested by his wife. Julie Smith is the guardian for her husband, court documents show.
Wagshul is a Dayton, Ohio-area pulmonologist who is listed as a founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCCA), a nonprofit that touts ivermectin as both a preventative and treatment for COVID-19. Its “How To Get Ivermectin” section includes prices and locations of pharmacies that will supply it, from Afghanistan to Fort Lauderdale to Pennsylvania to Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Neither Wagshul’s office nor UC Health would give an update on Jeffrey Smith’s condition as of Monday, citing a federal privacy in health care law.
Poison control centers have reported an uptick in calls about the drug, with some callers reporting significant symptoms such as extreme vomiting to blurred vision.
Ivermectin was originally developed to deworm livestock animals before doctors began using it against parasitic diseases among humans. Several researchers won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for establishing its efficacy in humans. It’s available with a prescription to treat head lice, onchocerciasis (river blindness) and other ailments in humans.
The FDA, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health have warned Americans against the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, a viral disease. It’s unproven as a treatment, they say, and large doses of it can be dangerous and cause serious harm.
A review of available literature conducted earlier this month by the journal Nature found there’s no certainty in the available data on the potential benefits of ivermectin. There are six active clinical trials of ivermectin in the U.S. against COVID-19, according to a search of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s website, Clinicaltrials.gov. Most of the six trials call for ivermectin to be used with other drugs; all but one are small-scale, early studies. One study was withdrawn.
Interest in the drug has been rising as the delta variant has caused high transmission rates of COVID-19.
It’s fueled by endorsements from allies of former President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-wisc., plus Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. The CDC warned reports of poisoning related to use of ivermectin have increased threefold this year, spiking in July.
Julie Smith filed the lawsuit on behalf of her husband of 24 years. He tested positive for COVID-19 July 9, was hospitalized and admitted to the ICU July 15. He was put on the hospital’s COVID-19 protocol of the antiviral drug Remdesivir along with plasma and steroids. On July 27, “after a period of relative stability,” Jeffrey Smith’s condition began to decline.
He was sedated and intubated and placed on a ventilator on Aug. 1. He later developed a secondary infection he was still wrestling with as of Aug. 23, court records say.
Jeffrey Smith was in a medically induced coma on Aug. 20, according to an affidavit his wife filed with her lawsuit. “My husband is on death’s doorstep; he has no other options,” she wrote, adding at another point that her husband’s chances of survival had “dropped to less than 30%.”
Julie Smith says her husband is a network engineer for Verizon. “He enjoys fishing, hiking and camping with our family,” she said in the affidavit. The Smiths live in Fairfield Township and have three children. “Family is his everything,” Julie Smith said.
The lawsuit doesn’t mention whether Jeffrey Smith is vaccinated against COVID-19. However, overwhelming majorities of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated – data from the Ohio Department of Health shows of roughly 21,000 Ohioans hospitalized with COVID-19 since Jan. 1, only about 500 were vaccinated.
Julie Smith found ivermectin on her own and connected with Wagshul. He prescribed the drug, and the hospital refused to administer it.
A hospital spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment on litigation.
Smith is represented by lawyer Ralph Lorigo, the chairman of New York’s Erie County Conservative Party, who has successfully file two similar cases in Illinois (one against a Chicago area hospital and another in and two more in upstate New York. He did not respond to an email or phone call.
In an interview with the Ohio Capital Journal, Wagshul said the science behind ivermectin’s use in COVID-19 patients is “irrefutable.” The CDC and FDA engaged in a “conspiracy,” he said, to block its use to protect the FDA’S emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines. He said the mainstream media and social media companies have been engaging in “censorship” on ivermectin’s merits, and that the U.S. government’s refusal to acknowledge its benefits amounts to genocide.
“If we were a country looking at another country allowing those (COVID-19) deaths daily … we would have been screaming, ‘Genocide!’ ” he said.
Wagshul said he had no financial interest in the sale of ivermectin.
Dr. Leanne Chrisman-khawam, a physician and professor at the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, called the FLCCCA “snake oil salesmen.” She reviewed the association’s research on the drug’s uses and said there are some serious problems with its cited studies: many of them don’t show positive results, and those that do bear design flaws like small control groups, unaccounted for variables, nonblinded studies, not accounting for mitigations like vaccines and masking practices, and others.
“Based on evidence-based medicine and my read on this large number of small studies, I would find this very suspect, even the positive outcomes,” she told the Ohio Capital Journal.