Doctors to the Rescue: Fred Wagshul

A hospital and a court are denying ivermectin to an Ohio man fighting for his life. Says Dr. Wagshul: "To Jeffrey Smith and his family, I will keep fighting for you."

Dr. Fred Wagshul, pulmonologist and medical director at the Lung Center of America and clinical instructor at Wright State University School of Medicine (where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society), has recommitted himself to the Hippocratic Oath in the highly publicized battle to save Jeffrey Smith’s life with ivermectin.

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Since late August, there has been a full-on media assault against ivermectin for COVID-19. Part of the media coverage included the story of the Cincinnati, Ohio, woman who filed a lawsuit in Butler County to compel West Chester Hospital to give her husband ivermectin after they told her there was nothing more they could do for him. Her husband, Jeff Smith, had been on a ventilator for about one month.

After a lengthy discussion with his wife concerning Mr. Smith’s clinical status and his medical history, I agreed to prescribe ivermectin to Mr. Smith—since the hospital was refusing any additional therapy. The case went forward, and the judge granted the court order.

Then the media pounced.

They called ivermectin “horse dewormer,” though it has saved millions the world over for decades since it was approved by the FDA in 1987. It is one of the world’s safest medicines. It is on the WHO’s list of “Essential Medicines.” It is inexpensive and globally available. Plus, dozens of peer-reviewed, scientific studies show that it is efficacious for every stage of COVID-19 disease.

And it won its developers the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for its ability to save millions of lives throughout the world.

So why has ivermectin been in the crosshairs of the media? My take: Ivermectin is cheap, so it is unprofitable. It is a workhorse of a drug and has emerged as a proven, lifesaving therapy for COVID-19. This, while pharmaceutical companies race to develop their own “ivermectin-like” antiviral drugs—whose modes of action are similar to ivermectin. These new drugs won’t be cheap. They will be very profitable. But I believe that when they are rolled out in the future, they will never be able to be as efficacious for COVID-19 as ivermectin is right now.

So this is just to let you know that regardless of what the media may say, I know this medicine, as part of a multi-modal protocol that also includes vaccines, saves lives. On the day I became a physician, I swore to “first do no harm” as part of the Hippocratic Oath. With this essay, I am publicly recommitting myself to that oath. It is my hope that other physicians around the world will do the same.

It is true that after a patient has been on a ventilator for a prolonged period of time fighting the debilitating effects of COVID-19, options to recover these patients are few. But I have seen patients who’ve spent weeks on a ventilator be successfully weaned away and return home to their families—with the addition of ivermectin to the therapeutic cocktail.

I have worked with Buffalo, New York, attorney Ralph Lorigo on several of these cases requiring court orders for ivermectin. Lorigo has prevailed in all but one of these cases. That means that the judges are recognizing the validity of the science for ivermectin.

It is written in the Talmud that “those who save one life save the entire world.” Where there is life, there is hope. If we forget that as doctors, and if we throw up our hands and do not try everything we know to save every life we can, then we are in violation of the oath we took to act in the best interest of every patient.

Every patient.

In early January, 2021, when the Critical Care team of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) met with the NIH’s COVID-19 treatment panel, nearly 4,000 American were dying every day of COVID-19. The team asked the NIH to recommend ivermectin as part of a COVID-19 prevention and early treatment protocol (I+MASK+). The NIH came back with a “neutral” stance on ivermectin, falling well short of the advice of the FLCCC to recommend the early treatment protocols that were saving lives in the regions and countries of the world where they were being used. This is a profound failure of the U.S. government to protect its citizens during a killer pandemic.

So, to Jeffrey Smith and his family, I will keep fighting for you. You deserve this chance. And I will do everything I can to ensure that you get it.

If you’d like to to know more, go to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Allliance’s Summary of the Evidence for Ivermectin in COVID-19.