Doctors Should Avoid Being Bullied Into Giving Ivermectin

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan at the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. I've been tracking — with some amazement, anger, and upset — the outbreak of interest in using ivermectin, a deworming medicine made by Merck, as a treatment for COVID-19.

Very recently, there was a patient at Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center near Chicago. She was an anti-vaxxer who wound up getting COVID-19 and was in the intensive care unit (ICU), and she wanted the hospital to give her ivermectin. They wouldn't. She found a doctor who would prescribe it, but the hospital refused to give it anyway.

There have been other instances where courts have ordered ivermectin to be given to very sick people in ICUs at the request of relatives. The ivermectin story reminds me a little bit of the days when we were all worried about hydroxychloroquine, the unproven intervention that was touted by President Trump and many other people as a treatment for COVID-19, for which there were no data, no evidence, and no trials.

Sadly, the same is true for ivermectin. A little bit of information came out saying that it might be prophylactic in terms of avoiding getting COVID-19, but those studies were weak and not well controlled, and some of them have been withdrawn owing to the investigators being accused of falsifying data.