In a rare case in which a US court has sided with family members’ request with regard to the medical treatment, Butler County Judge Gregory Howard has sided with a suburban Cincinnati woman and granted her order forcing the hospital to treat her husband’s COVID infection with ivermectin, New York Post reports.
The antiparasitic treatment commonly used for livestock is unproven in the treatment of COVID-19 and is not recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Judge Howard’s order goes against their recommendations.
Julie Smith, whose husband Jeffrey has been on a ventilator, filed a lawsuit in a Butler County court against the West Chester Hospital on Aug. 20, demanding an emergency order for the use of ivermectin in a last-ditch effort to keep her husband alive.
Court documents show Jeffrey was admitted to the ICU of the hospital on July 15, where he was treated within the hospital’s COVID-19 protocol with plasma, steroids and the antiviral medication remdesivir, but starting July 27, his condition began to decline and reached to a point where he was sedated, intubated and placed on a ventilator on August 1.
In the course of the next two weeks, Jeffrey had several subsequent serious infections that left him with a roughly 30% chance of survival, forcing the doctors to put him in a medically induced coma on Aug. 20.
Faced with her husband’s slim survival chances, Julie Smith managed to get in touch with the leading proponent of ivermectin and founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, Dr. Fred Wagshul, who wrote the prescription for ivermectin, but the hospital refused to administer it to her husband, forcing her to file the lawsuit.
Judge Howard ordered in his decision that Dr. Wagshul’s daily prescription of 30 mg of ivermectin for three weeks to be filled as requested by his wife and his legal guardian, but neither Wagshul’s office nor UC Health gave an update on Jeffrey Smith’s condition as of Monday, citing a federal privacy in health care law.
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