At the request of the Nebraska Department of Health, on Oct. 15, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson issued a legal opinion that Nebraska healthcare providers can legally prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID, so long as they obtain informed consent from the...
childrenshealthdefense.org
On Oct. 15, Nebraska Attorney General (AG) Doug Peterson
issued a legal opinion that Nebraska healthcare providers
can legally prescribe off-label medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of
COVID, so long as they obtain informed consent from the patient.
However, if they did neglect to obtain consent, deceive, prescribe excessively high doses or other misconduct, they could be subject to discipline, Peterson wrote.
The AG’s office emphasized it was not recommending any specific treatment for COVID. “That is not our role,”
Peterson wrote. “Rather, we address only the off-label early treatment options discussed in this opinion and conclude that the available evidence suggests they might work for some people.”
Peterson said allowing physicians to consider early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of the hospital and provide relief for our already strained healthcare system.
The
opinion, based on an assessment of relevant scientific literature, was rendered in response to a request by Dannette Smith, CEO of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.
Smith asked the AG’s office to look into whether doctors could face discipline or legal action under
Nebraska’s Uniform Credential Act (UCA) — meant to protect public health, safety and welfare — if they prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
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“After receiving your question and conducting our investigation, we have found significant controversy and suspect information about potential COVID-19 treatments,”
Peterson wrote.
For example, a paper published in the Lancet — one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world — denounced hydroxychloroquine as dangerous, yet the statistics were flawed and the authors refused to provide analyzed data.
The
paper was retracted, but not before countries stopped using the drug and trials were cancelled or interrupted.
“The Lancet’s own editor-in-chief admitted that the paper was a ‘fabrication,’ a ‘monumental fraud’ and a ‘shocking example of research misconduct’ in the middle of a global health emergency,” Peterson wrote in the opinion.
A recently published paper on COVID recognized that “for reasons that are yet to be clarified,” early treatment has not been emphasized despite numerous U.S. healthcare providers advocating for early treatment and “scores of treating and academic physicians” — who have published papers in well respected journals — urging early interventions.
Peterson cited
numerous studies showing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine reduced mortality by up to 75% or more when used as a preventative or prophylaxis for COVID, suggesting hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved had the drugs been widely used in America.
“Every citizen — Democrat or Republican — should be grateful for Doug Peterson’s thoughtful and courageous counteroffensive against the efforts of
Big Pharma, its captive federal regulators, and its media and social media allies to
silence doctors and deny Americans life-saving treatments,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense,
told The Defender via email.
“We finally have a leader who puts constitutional rights, peer-reviewed science and human health above industry profits. Doug Peterson is uncowed and unbowed — a genuine hero on horseback for all Americans.” Kennedy said.
Children’s Health Defense President Mary Holland agreed. “This Nebraska AG opinion lets doctors get back to being doctors — without being second-guessed by government, pharmacists and others interfering in the crucial doctor-patient relationship,” Holland said.
Although the AG’s office did not rule out the possibility that other off-label drugs might show promise — either now or in the future — as a prophylaxis or treatment against COVID, it confined its opinion to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for the sake of brevity.
Nebraska AG highlights science on ivermectin
In his legal opinion,
Peterson concluded evidence showed ivermectin demonstrated striking effectiveness in preventing and treating COVID, and any side effects were primarily minor and transient. “Thus, the UCA does not preclude physicians from considering ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID,” Peterson wrote.
In the decade leading up to the COVID pandemic, Peterson found numerous studies showing ivermectin’s antiviral activity against several RNA viruses by blocking the nuclear trafficking of viral proteins, adding to 50 years of research confirming ivermectin’s antiviral effects.
In addition, safety data for ivermectin showed side effects were “vanishingly small.” The latest statistics available through VigiAccess reported only 5,674 adverse drug reactions to ivermectin between 1992 and October 13, 2021, an “incredibly low” number given that 3.7 billion doses have been administered since the 1980s, Peterson wrote.
Peterson cited several studies showing ivermectin led to
improvement of COVID outcomes when used in early treatment or as a prophylaxis, while noting many studies with negative findings about ivermectin “
excluded most available evidence,”
cherry picked data within studies, misreported data, made
unsupported assertions of adverse reactions to ivermectin and had “
conclusions that did follow from evidence.”
Peterson also found that
epidemiological evidence for ivermectin’s effectiveness, derived by analyzing COVID-related data from various states, countries or regions is instructive in the context of a global pandemic.
In one instance, a group of scholars
analyzed data comparing COVID rates of countries that routinely administer ivermectin as a prophylaxis and countries that did not. The research showed “countries with routine mass drug administration of prophylactic … ivermectin have a significantly lower incidence of COVID-19.”
“This ‘highly significant’ correlation manifests itself not only ‘in a worldwide context’ but also when comparing African countries that regularly administer prophylactic ‘ivermectin against parasitic infections’ and African countries that do not,” Peterson wrote. “Based on these results, the researchers surmised that these results may be connected to ivermectin’s ability to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication, which likely leads to lower infection rates.”