A judge in suburban Cincinnati has ordered a hospital to give a COVID-19 patient the livestock deworming drug Ivermectin, medicine that federal regulators warn against using to treat the coronavirus.
Jeffrey Smith’s wife had sought to force West Chester Hospital, part of the University of Cincinnati network, to administer Ivermectin to her 51-year-old husband, who has been in ICU for several weeks with the disease, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.
Filed on Aug. 23, the order from Butler County Common Pleas Judge Gregory Howard compels the hospital to provide Mr. Smith with 30 mg of Ivermectin daily for three weeks.
Like hydroxychloroquine before it, Ivermectin is a drug whose off-label use has been touted, particularly in conservative media and nonmedical circles, as a COVID-19 treatment.
Ivermectin can be prescribed for human use in limited doses, typically in tablet form to treat parasitic worms and as a topical cream to treat lice and rosacea, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But the FDA has warned that ivermectin “is not an anti-viral” and that “taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm” and death.
The agency even issued a strong and unusual warning on Aug. 21 on social media: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” The FDA was reacting to alarms from Mississippi, the state with the worst outbreak in the U.S., that people have been taking Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.
In recent weeks, calls to poison-control hotlines have surged in several states as people snap up the drug in various forms - including buying out livestock supply centers for the veterinary formulation of the drug.
Mr. Smith’s wife, Julie Smith, said the drug was prescribed by Dr. Fred Wagshul, an Ohio physician who her lawsuit identifies as “one of the foremost experts on using Ivermectin in treating COVID-19,” according to the Journal. But the hospital refused to administer it.
The Journal reported that Mr. Smith tested positive for COVID-19 on July 9, and was admitted to the ICU July 15 where 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," Mr. Smith's condition began to decline.
He was sedated and intubated and placed on a ventilator on Aug. 1 and later placed in a medically induced coma, according to the Journal.
"My husband is on death's doorstep; he has no other options," she wrote in an affidavit filed with her lawsuit, adding at another point that her husband's chances of survival had "dropped to less than 30%."
The hospital said they would not comment on litigation.
The Washington Post and Bloomberg contributed.
First Published: August 30, 2021, 6:20 p.m.
