Ohio Judge Orders Hospital To Administer Horse Drug To Covid Patient
Mmmmmmm, horse paste. Spread it on toast, dollop it over ice cream, stir it into a glass of refreshing iced tea. However you enjoy it, don't forget to take your ivermectin every day to keep the COVID demons away. At least according to one judge in Ohio who just ordered a hospital to administer the unapproved anti-parasitic drug to a patient in a medically induced coma.
As reported by the Ohio Capital Journal, Butler County Judge J. Gregory Howard ordered West Chester Hospital to begin immediately dosing patient Jeffrey Smith with ivermectin after his wife Julie sued to force his doctors to go along with the unverified treatment.
And the horse paste shit is funny, of course. The fact that the FDA is tweeting "you are not a horse" as lunatics are frantically buying up sheep dip and crapping their pants is funny — albeit only when viewed through the lens of having survived the past five years of chaos. It's all so bloody absurd, you laugh so you don't cry at the prospect of thousands of Americans refusing a safe, effective vaccine and dosing themselves with veterinary compounds.
But it's also really, really not funny. Because this complaint is bloody depressing.
In a nutshell, the plaintiff is desperate to save her husband, who was intubated but woke up and pulled out the ventilator, which caused him to aspirate the contents of his feed tube. His lungs are infected, he's not improving, and his prognosis is poor. And so the wife went online and found a doctor and a lawyer with their own agendas who were only too happy to step in and turn her fear into publicity for their causes.
Dr. Fred Wagshul of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance is making a name for himself flogging this shit, along with the conspiracy theory that the Deep State is keeping it from you for REASONS.
In an interview, 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.
He seems nice.
Attorney Ralph Lorigo, chairman of the Erie County Conservative Party in New York, has turned himself into the go-to guy for ivermectin lawsuits, with complaints filed in Illinois, New York, and now Pennsylvania.
The hospital doesn't appear to have mounted much of a defense to the suit, which might be a signal that it simply wants to be relieved of liability for administering a medically contraindicated treatment. And maybe Judge Howard wasn't persuaded by the pile of anecdata dumped on the docket by Lorigo and Wagshul. Maybe he took pity on Julie Smith, and reasoned that her husband was likely to die, so it would be a mercy to let her live the rest of her life believing that she did all she could to save him. Maybe that was the right decision, even if it legitimizes a quack cure that's currently poisoning thousands of people and giving them permission to forego the vaccine and prolong this plague we've been living with for almost two years.
That's a value judgment and an issue of Ohio health and guardianship law. But exploiting this woman's grief and fear for self-aggrandizement and political capital is also a value judgment. And it is a despicable one which reflects poorly on both the medical and legal professions.
It's funny, but also ... not.
[Ohio Capital Journal / All case docs available via Butler County Clerk's Office]
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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore with her wonderful husband and a houseful of teenagers. When she isn't being mad about a thing on the internet, she's hiding in plain sight in the carpool line. She's the one wearing yoga pants glaring at her phone.
