OKLAHOMA CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Doctors in Oklahoma are well within their professional rights to prescribe ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to COVID-19 patients, state Attorney General John O’Connor affirmed, despite the drugs’ disfavored status within the federal health bureaucracy.
“The Attorney General’s office finds no legal basis for a state medical licensure board to discipline a licensed physician for exercising sound judgment and safely prescribing an FDA-approved drug – like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine – for the off-label purpose of treating a patient with COVID-19,” O’Connor’s office concluded in a February 8 statement, declaring that “healthcare professionals should have every tool available to combat COVID-19.”
“The Attorney General’s office neither condones nor condemns a specific course of treatment for COVID-19,” the release added. “Our office maintains that proper healthcare decisions are to be made between a patient and his or her physician, and the government should not interfere with their relationship.”
Despite being misrepresented in the mainstream media as aquarium cleaner and horse dewormer, respectively, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are both FDA-approved medications with a range of human applications, such that both are listed on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines. Like many medications, ivermectin is also used for horses, but human dosages of the drug for human ailments were not controversial until IVM started gaining notice in the context of COVID-19.
While experts continue to debate the drugs’ effectiveness at treating COVID-19, promising studies as well as reports of positive results have generated significant interest in them, as has the fact that they have been used and studied for far longer than the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and released in record time by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative. Many believe the long-established drugs are safer than relatively new vaccines they believe have been rushed and politicized.
Despite the established safety of IVM and HCQ, and the evolving nature of COVID knowledge, families across the country have had to go to court to force hospitals to let them try the drugs for their loved ones, while doctors have seen their medical licenses threatened for prescribing them – a scenario the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office indicates will not be tolerated in the Sooner State.
The University of Minnesota, Emory University School of Medicine, Northwestern Medicine, and other medical institutions are currently conducting a major at-home clinical trial to assess ivermectin’s effectiveness at treating COVID-19, as well as that of the drugs metformin and fluvoxamine or any combination of the three.