TUCSON, Ariz., June 19, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A number of hospitals have been sued for refusing to allow patients dying of COVID to receive treatment with ivermectin. If the hospital lost, it appealed the decision, even if the patient did receive ivermectin and recover, according to attorney Andrew Schlafly in the summer issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
“Hospitals wanted to establish precedents for their side, so that next time they could deny treatment by pointing to appellate decisions in their favor,” Schlafly writes. They adopted a “strategy of seeking to establish precedents that increased their authority, and to remove any precedents against unlimited power for them.”
Ivermectin is a long-established safe drug that is widely used to treat parasitic infections. It has also been shown to have antiviral activity. Many physicians have reported successful use in COVID patients, and many though not all studies have shown safety and benefit, the article maintains.
Typically, courts refuse to intervene, stating that “judges are not doctors.” Schlafly calls this “misleading, because the court deferred to a hospital not licensed to practice medicine rather than to a doctor who is so licensed. It is a central obligation of courts to resolve competing assertions of authority, which this court did while pretending otherwise. This case was no different conceptually from a dispute over property rights, which courts resolve every day.”
Many state appellate courts cite the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) disparagement of ivermectin as a legal basis for hospitals to deny access by dying patients to this drug, long approved by the FDA as safe. Schlafly writes that the FDA has “been able to evade judicial review for too long…. The more the FDA avoids submitting to discovery procedures that are commonplace for every other defendant, the bigger the mushrooms can grow in the dark at this federal agency.”
“Improper interference by a federal agency with the lifesaving medical practices of physicians should not be immune from judicial review.” Schlafly concludes.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.
Contact: Andrew Schlafly, (908) 719-8608, ASchlafly@aol.com or Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com
