New Hampshire may become the first state to allow the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to be obtained without a prescription. A Republican-sponsored ivermectin bill (HB 1022) passed in the N.H. State House Wednesday on a vote of 183-159 and has been sent to the State Senate for review.
“Ivermectin is available over the counter in 79 countries,” State Representative Jim Kofalt, R-Hillsborough noted during a legislative hearing in January. “And it has a good safety profile.”
Republicans argue that granting easy access to ivermectin will allow individuals to make medical choices that are prohibited by the medical establishment.
“We still have patients who don’t know how to find the doctors who will write prescriptions for ivermectin,” said Rep. Leah Cushman, who is also a nurse. “It’s safer than having to go to the farm store.”
On Monday, the Republican-led committee voted on several other bills related to the pandemic, including a bill barring the state from enforcing any federal vaccine mandate, which passed on partisan lines.
The committee also rejected a Democrat bid to undo a law passed last year that enshrined medical freedom regarding vaccine mandates.
N.H. lawmakers unanimously rejected a bill to add the COVID vaccine to the list required to attend public schools.
The Portsmouth Herald made its disapproval of Ivermectin clear in its report on the bill’s passage, describing promoters of the potentially life-saving drug as “anti-vaccine activists,” and claiming that there is “no evidence to support” that it can treat the coronavirus.
“During the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists have latched onto ivermectin, though it has not been approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19, nor is there evidence to support that it can treat the virus,” wrote Herald reporter Josh Rogers in the paper’s website Seacoastline.com.
In truth, there have been numerous studies that show evidence of large reductions of mortality in COVID patients treated with ivermectin.
The paper linked to another Herald report titled: ‘Misinformation can be deadly’: Doctors say Ivermectin does not work to treat COVID-19.
That article quotes several doctors who don’t recommend Ivermectin because it can have harmful side effects if taken in large doses.
Dr. Neil Meehan, chief physician executive and an emergency room doctor at Exeter Hospital, testified during the Jan. hearing that “poison control lines are saying that almost 100% of their toxicity calls right now are about Ivermectin.”
Also, the docs argued that randomized trials show that it doesn’t work to treat COVID. However, at least some of these studies appear to have been designed to fail.
In Oxford’s Principle trial on Ivermectin, for instance, researchers treated late stage COVID patients with Ivermectin, but the drug works best as a preventative, and as an early treatment to COVID, doctors like Dr. Pierre Kory say.
Notably, unlike Dr. Kory, none of the doctors cited in the Herald’s report appear to have had any experience in treating COVID patients with Ivermectin. But Kory, Dr. Peter McCullough, and many other pro-Ivermectin frontline doctors have cited their own success in treating hundreds of patients with the drug.