Sept. 8 Quick Takes: Appeals court backs physicians who prescribed ivermectin

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that a lower court wrongly dismissed a case brought by three physicians who assert that FDA’s tweets warning the public not to take ivermectin to treat COVID-19 were illegal. The three physicians filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, which dismissed the case, ruling that FDA’s sovereign immunity protects it from such litigation. The physicians stated that they had prescribed ivermectin to thousands of COVID-19 patients, and that an FDA social media campaign warning against its use to treat the disease had caused them professional and personal harms, including being fired from positions at a medical school and hospital, losing hospital admitting privileges, and being referred to physician regulatory boards.

The Fifth Circuit focused on three tweets FDA posted between August 2021 and April 2022 in which the agency stated that ivermectin is typically used to treat viral infections in barnyard animals and shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19. The Fifth Circuit stated that FDA was illegally interfering with the practice of medicine because ivermectin is approved for some human uses and can be prescribed off label. The ruling sends the case to back the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas...