Family wonders whether their mother, wife would still be alive if doctors gave her ivermectin.
Brenda Downs was dying.
Mrs. Downs, 64, contracted COVID-19 while on vacation. She went to the local emergency room after returning home for treatment. She was transferred to a bigger facility in Ohio when her condition worsened.
Mrs. Downs, though, kept getting worse, despite a federally recommended treatment course including remdesivir.
On the same day Mrs. Downs was placed on a ventilator, her family asked doctors to try ivermectin, an anti-malarial that has had some success against COVID-19. Because the treatment course was not working, relatives felt it was time to try something new.
The hospital refused. A clinical ethicist there cited how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned people against using ivermectin against COVID-19. The ethicist claimed there could be “great harms” if Mrs. Downs was given ivermectin.
“This may make the family upset,” he wrote in notes reviewed by The Epoch Times.
But Mrs. Downs’s husband and daughters weren’t giving up. They sued the hospital to try to force the facility to either administer ivermectin or allow an outside doctor in to administer it.
A local doctor who reviewed Mrs. Downs’s case said she should be able to receive the drug. Based on his research into ivermectin, he said there was “very little downside” in trying the drug, whether it worked or not.
A settlement was reached on Aug. 19, 2021. The settlement said that the hospital would administer ivermectin, but that the administration was conditional on “the treating physician(s) professional judgement and discretion, and the applicable standard of care.” (… more HERE)
